The key to beginning to understand the Incarnation, God becoming Man, is Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and His Passion and death on the Cross. If you recall, after the Last Supper in the Upper Room, Jesus and the apostles, except for Judas who was on his errand of betrayal already, went to the Garden of Gethsemane. John tells us that Jesus went there with the apostles frequently to pray, and thus it would be one of the first places Judas would have known to look for Him. The wheels of the Passion are in motion. Jesus knows exactly what is coming, and that it is coming within a matter of hours. He withdraws a short distance from the Apostles to pray, but close enough that they can still see Him. He asks the Apostles to simply stay awake (because it is now the middle of the night) and to watch and pray. Jesus withdraws and begins to pray. But what the apostles see is horrifying.

Jesus isn’t calmly and serenely kneeling in prayer. Jesus is literally lying on the ground, curled up in a ball, writhing in agony. Our Lord is a quivering, trembling, sobbing mess. Jesus is in such stress and agony that the capillaries in the sweat glands in His scalp and forehead are bursting, and there is blood in the sweat that is running down His face, mingling with His tears, and dropping on the ground. This is the first bloodshed of His Sorrowful Passion.

Sobbing and shaking, Jesus BEGS the Father to let the events of the next twelve hours pass from Him if at all possible, but resigns Himself to the will of the Father. Reading this, some may be unimpressed with Jesus. After all, many, many men and women have gone to their torture and execution fully aware of what was coming, while managing to maintain their composure. Some men, especially, might be tempted to view Jesus and being somewhat cowardly in the face of His Passion, and thus be a bit turned-off by the whole scene.

Yes, Jesus is terrified. He is more terrified in this moment than all of the terror felt by mankind in all of history combined, raised to the power of infinity. His terror is testing the limits of the human body. If any of us felt anything even close to the sort of fear that Jesus felt, we would drop dead. People can and have died purely of fright and/or intense psychological stress, usually by means of a heart attack precipitated by massive adrenaline production.

But the real question is, “What is He afraid of?” His terror and agony are NOT purely centered around the physical means of His death. He is not trembling and sobbing because he is thinking solely of the pain of being scourged, or the pain of being crucified.

He is curled up in a ball crying so hard that He is sweating blood because He is thinking about WHO is going to torture and kill Him.

When God took on human flesh, human nature, He took on EVERY ASPECT of our existence. He experiences the same things that we do – except with complete purity and at an infinitely amplified level. And that obviously includes love, given that He is Love Itself. And being that He is also completely God, that is He also has a Divine Nature, He is in Himself infinite knowledge and infinite love. In a nutshell, this means that Jesus went through His entire life on earth completely in love with every single person. Every person He saw or passed on the street He had known from all eternity; He had created that person atom-by- atom accordingly in the fullness of time; He had full, intimate knowledge of that person’s every thought, desire and deed; He was infinitely in love with that person.

Can you imagine what simply going into town and walking through the market must have been like? Every face He passed was His beloved. Every person who brushed by Him was a source of simultaneous joy and the pain of unrequited love. Every laugh of delight He heard was a laugh He wanted to share, and every whimper of sadness was sadness He wanted to console, every struggle was a struggle He wanted to help, and every bit of pain was pain He wanted to soothe. And not in an abstract, altruistic way. He wanted to engage these things personally, as we would with our intimate beloved. But He couldn’t. Can you imagine having all of that love pent up inside of you, with your beloved so near, and have to hold it all inside?  Are we starting to get an idea of how terrible and wonderful the Incarnation is? Remember all of this.

Let’s go back to the Garden. Jesus takes a couple of breaks from His prayer to go back and talk to the Apostles, who are His best friends. Yes, He loves everybody, but the Apostles are different. They know, to a small extent, who He is. They have spent many days and evenings together working, playing, eating and just talking. Jesus has told them who He is, and He has told them in no uncertain terms that He loves them. And they have assured Him that they love Him too. Their relationship is not one-sided. Jesus – God Incarnate – has gotten to experience reciprocal human friendship and love with these men, infinitely lopsided though it may have been.

Jesus has just spent a considerable amount of time in agony a stone’s throw away from His beloved friends, and when He comes back to them, He finds them all asleep. He is dying. (My soul is sorrowful even unto death.) He asked them, His beloved best friends, to simply stay with Him, watch, and pray. And they couldn’t even stay awake. And this happened twice. Heart. Ache. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Now here comes Judas. As with every other person, Jesus is loves Judas infinitely. Judas is the person Jesus loves most in the world (and that goes for every person because Jesus is God and thus has infinite capacity.) And Judas has sold Him out. It is one thing to be betrayed by an enemy. It is quite another to be sold for 30 pieces of silver (which assuming one ounce pieces would equate to just under $1000 today) by the person you love most in the world. And just to make it as terrible as possible, Judas has told the guards that the man he kisses, the man to whom he gives the gesture of FRIENDSHIP and LOVE, is Jesus. And so when Judas kisses Him and Jesus says to Judas, “You betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” there is agony there that can not be described. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The guards. Every single one of them is the subject of Jesus’ infinite love.  And they despise Him. Jesus could have stopped it all at any time, not by some act of miraculous violence, but by asking the commanding guard if he remembered that certain tree he used to climb as a child, or that certain toy. He could have frozen them in their tracks by simply reminding them of their own experiences and feelings – which He had already shared with them because He had been with them the whole time. But He didn’t, because He couldn’t. If He didn’t let them kill Him, there would be no hope of ever being with them in heaven. Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Now before the High Priest Caiaphas. Same thing. Except Caiaphas, and the rest of the Sanhedrin, have been as their entire vocation and purpose in life, praying for the coming of the Messiah. They have been praying to Jesus (unwittingly) for Jesus (unwittingly). And Jesus has heard their prayers, and the prayers of all of the priests for generations past, and is finally, finally now standing in front of them. And remember, He loves them each personally. They look Him up and down and utterly reject Him. “No, no. You’re all wrong. You’re not what we want. We want a big macho-man king to vanquish the Romans and sit on the throne and then make us all rich by association. LOOK AT YOU. YOU’RE ALL WRONG. WE DON’T WANT YOU. Go to hell and good riddance.”  Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Pilate. Selfish indifference. “Look man, I neither know nor care who you are or who you say you are, and frankly, I think you’re just another loon. I have a lot on my mind and I simply can’t deal with crap like this.”  Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The Roman scourgers. Jesus was whipped and flagellated until most of His skin was gone by men whom He loved infinitely and intimately. Can you imagine how He felt as he walked to the pillar, turned and saw the faces of his scourgers, and seeing the face of every human being looking back at Him, including me, and you? Can you imagine being slowly and brutally whipped to the brink of death by the person you love most in the world? Say your spouse or best friend? It would be one thing to be whipped by a total stranger or a known enemy. But to be tortured by the person you love most in the world? Unfathomable agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The crowds. Everywhere there were crowds of people looking on – the scourging, the trial, the streets he walked while carrying His Cross to Calvary. Every single face was intimately loved. And every single face, excepting Mary, John, Mary Magdalene and a few other women, were either viciously hostile or completely indifferent. I wonder which was worse? The reason I ask is because the opposite of love is NOT hate, as most would assume. The opposite of love is indifference. There is no greater blow that can be made to a human soul than indifference. How many people saw Jesus that day – locked eyes with Him – and honestly didn’t give a rat’s @$$ either way. “Live. Die. Whatever. Just don’t bother me. You’re messing up my plans. YOU’RE MAKING MY LIFE HARD. Now I’m going to have to go completely out of my way to get around You and this damnable mess You’re making.”  This may have been the worst agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Almost everyone treats Jesus with indifference to one degree or another. We are all inflicting that agony on Him. How, you ask? By sinning. We know that our sins hurt Him infinitely, but we commit them anyway. Few people sin because they actively HATE Jesus personally and want to hurt Him. A few do, with Catholic apostates and satanists being the most common, the ranks of both swelling in these dark days, but not too many relative to the broad population. No, most people are just indifferent. There He is at the pillar, and our sin is the next lash. And we do it anyway. In fact, we lean into it. CRACK! Because we’re indifferent. And again, and again.

“Live. Die. Whatever. Just don’t bother me. You’re messing up my plans. YOU’RE MAKING MY LIFE HARD. Now I’m going to have to go completely out of my way to get around You and this damndable mess You’re making.”

“But I love you.  This is all for you.”

“That’s your choice, and your problem.  Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

Agony beyond words. This is the Reality of the Incarnation.

That is why Jesus was sobbing in agony in the Garden. He didn’t fear the physical pain. He feared being utterly, completely and totally rejected to the point of torture, execution and the indifferent witnessing of this by the person He loved most in the world, which is YOU. And ME.

He feared not being tortured and killed, but being tortured and killed by the person He loved most in the world. And despite this, He still chose to go through with it all. Not only that, but He would do it even it was only for you and you alone.  And beyond that, he would do it all for you and you alone AS MANY TIMES AS YOU ASSIST AS MASS OVER THE COURSE OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, plus more.  Infinite love means INFINITE. LOVE.

He went all the way to the end, just so there would be a CHANCE that one day as He tells us “I love you,” that instead of responding with a hissing, contemptuous, “Oh, F*** you!”, which face it, is exactly what we all do to Him, we might instead respond with…

“I love You, too.  Have mercy on me, O Lord, a sinner.”

Christ being scourged by (Ann Barnhardt). Note (my) enthusiasm, and how (I) seem to be thoroughly enjoying it.

A longtime reader emailed in asking that one and all be reminded of the events recorded in the twentieth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. If any of you readers out there are “Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion” in the Novus Ordo, you really, really need to stop. Immediately.

As I have recounted on the Barnhardt Podcast, in my first year after being received into the Church (Novus Ordo), I did prison ministry at the Arapahoe County Jail. It was all laypeople. Not even the “permanent” deacons went. And, to my abject horror in retrospect, we were enjoined to perform “Catholic Communion Services” using a script authored by the not-very-conservative “conservative” Archbishop Charles Chaput. The “team leader” for the day would pass out, completely casually in the locker room of the jail, The Blessed Sacrament to each team going to one of the six cellblocks. “How many do you want? Six? Okay. Here.” I think back on that and cringe. More than once I was handed a pyx filled with Hosts, which I then PUT IN MY POCKET and carried down to the cellblock. The only thing I can say in my own defense is that as I was walking down to the cellblock, I would “talk” to Our Lord, generally remarking to Him that He was the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, Infinite Love and Power Himself, and… He was in my pocket. At least I acknowledged Him, and the situation, which is more than could be said for most. But it was still so totally, horrifically wrong.

Since I could speak a little Spanish, I was almost always sent to the Spanish-speaking cellblock, and most of the men who came to the “Communion Service” were either maximum security or super-max, that is, wearing either orange or red jumpsuits. Was I ever scared? No way. I was safe as a kitten. I had 15 or more exceptionally capable bodyguards at all times. The men were mostly Mexican, with some Central Americans. And I learned two very important lessons about Eucharistic piety from those men. First, many of them did not receive Holy Communion. Why? Because they had, in their words, “two wives”. That is, they were divorced and civilly “re-married”, or divorced and shacking up with another woman. They KNEW this meant that they could not receive – but they still came. The other thing I learned from the Latino felons in the jail was pre-conciliar Eucharistic piety. When they walked into the room, and saw the pyx containing the Blessed Sacrament on the table, they would immediately fall to their knees and reverence Our Lord. They believed in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Far, far more than the upper-middle class American Novus Ordoists.

The Fruit of the First Sorrowful Mystery, Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden, is SORROW FOR SIN. Oftentimes poorly formed priests tell people that once they have confessed a sin, they should never think about it again. This is wrong. As one progresses and tries to advance in sanctity, one of the graces that follows is realizing not only what sins one has committed in the past, but realizing WHY those sins were sins, and just how awful they were. So, not only did I confess my participation in these “Catholic Communion Services” and the intrinsic sacrilege of them and of my physical handling of the Blessed Sacrament, but I also always mention these sins when I make a General Confession. Thank God! Thank God that now I not only know, but that the horror of it gets continually stronger. Let this process of realizing the kind and gravity of my sins never cease!

Which brings us to the whole question of physically touching the Blessed Sacrament. It is all in John 20. Our Lord tells Mary Magdalene that SHE MAY NOT TOUCH HIM (verse 17), but just a few verses later specifically tells St. Thomas to stick his finger in Our Lord’s side (verse 27). What is the difference?

St. Thomas, having been present at The Last Supper which was not only about the institution of the Mass and the Eucharist, but also about the INSTITUTION OF THE PRIESTHOOD (Do this in memory of Me), was already an ordained priest. The Sacramentally Ordained may touch the Blessed Sacrament (Deacons, Priests, Bishops). Anyone else, male or female, may NOT. Period.

It isn’t a question of contrition. The Penitent Magdalen was more contrite than any of us will probably ever be for our sins. St. Thomas was in a state of extreme and even obstinate doubt until the moment he physically touched Our Lord. It is a question of the supernatural reality of the priesthood, and of the supernatural reality of the consecration of the Eucharist within the Mass, and the Real, Physical, Substantial Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Having unconsecrated hands touch the Blessed Sacrament is a direct attack upon the priesthood, and the Eucharist itself. It is a premeditated introduction of scandalous desacralization – the modern buzzword here is “DEMYTHOLOGIZATION“.

If you are NOT a Deacon, Priest or Bishop, STOP TOUCHING THE BLESSED SACRAMENT. Only receive Holy Communion from the hands of a Deacon, Priest or Bishop, and do so kneeling and on the tongue. Do not participate in the Freemasonic scandal of desacralization, the attack on the Priesthood, the Church and the Eucharist, which is what the whole “Extraordinary Monsters Ministers of Holy Communion” thing is. Believe me, you will be glad you did, and you will regret not having done so sooner.

Laypeople.

Ordained.

Dr. Mazza keeps doing yeoman’s work exposing the Bergoglian Antipapacy. May God reward him!

It is IMPOSSIBLE to enter into schism or be in schism by the act of holding the Catholic Faith whole and entire, and by being in union with and subject to the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and the Papacy in se.

Good faith controversy over the identity of the Vicar of Christ is NOT schismatic.

F.X. Wernz, P. Vidal: “Finally they cannot be numbered among the schismatics, who refuse to obey the Roman Pontiff because they consider his person to be suspect or doubtfully elected on account of rumours in circulation.” (Ius Canonicum, 7:398, 1943)

Rev Ignatius Szal: “Nor is there any schism if one merely transgress a papal law for the reason that one considers it too difficult, or if one refuses obedience inasmuch as one suspects the person of the pope or the validity of his election, or if one resists him as the civil head of a state.” (Communication of Catholics with Schismatics, 1948)

De Lugo: “Neither is someone a schismatic for denying his subjection to the Pontiff on the grounds that he has solidly founded [‘probabiliter’] doubts concerning the legitimacy of his election or his power [refers to Sanchez and Palao].” (Disp., De Virt. Fid. Div., disp xxv, sect iii, nn. 35-8)

Go to Mass. Ask Our Lord to give YOU the temporal punishments, if any, due your priests who might erroneously commemorate the wrong man at the Te Igitur.

St. Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, pray for us.

St. Peter Celestine, pray for us.

St. Michael the Archangel, guardian of the Vicar of Christ on Earth, pray for us.

St. Peter, pray for us.

St. Joseph, pray for us.

Our Lady of Copacabana, slayer of the Pachamama demon, pray for us.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us, on Your One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in terrifyingly visible eclipse, and on your current Vicar on Earth, Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger.

When I saw the headline above from Mr. Big Fur Hat at iotwreport.com, I jumped seeing ‘people who change tradition are narcissists’ thinking to myself, “Good heavens! Is iotwreport.com becoming a Traditional Catholic liturgy blog?”

No, the story is about the fact that apparently baseball is moving second base closer to home plate, but Mr. Hat’s point is exactly the same as a Latin Mass Catholic’s. Same game, different inning, if you will.

Baseball is moving second base 13.5 inches closer to home plate.

Why? Because some people don’t feel as if they are alive unless they are screwing with tradition.

Do click through and read the whole thing. It’s interesting on multiple levels.

Get an electric scooter they said ,it’ll be good for the environment they said ..and it’ll be fun…. pic.twitter.com/oEiZNwfL8p

— Penfold (@elbow112) April 9, 2022

(A word from Ann: While in Rome as a tourist, three places struck and drove home to me the reality of the history of the One True Church and of the City of Rome as an integral part of that reality, which we North Americans struggle to grasp:

1.) The church of San Paolo alla Regola – built over the house in which St. Paul lived and worked as a tent maker on the banks of the Tiber. It’s all real.

2.) The church of Domine Quo Vadis on the Appian Road, in which I stood and prayed in a cast of Our Lord’s miraculous footprints as He told Peter that He was going back to Rome to be crucified again. Indeed. Indeed…. It’s all so very real.

3.) The subject of Mr. Stein’s video today: the gazebo outside the church of St. John at the Latin Gate which houses the cauldron in which the Romans attempted to deep-fry St. John alive. But, as Our Lord promised, St. John came out of the boiling oil rejuvenated, lived many more years, wrote the Apocalypse, and died a natural death. It’s all so viscerally, inescapably real.

NEVER DOUBT OUR LORD’S PROMISES. ABOUT ANYTHING. EVER.

And the Lord said: Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat:

Ait autem Dominus : Simon, Simon, ecce Satanas expetivit vos ut cribraret sicut triticum :

But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.

ego autem rogavi pro te ut non deficiat fides tua : et tu aliquando conversus, confirma fratres tuos.

It’s all real.)

….

Mercy Sunday, St. Augustine, Societal Collapse!

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