Today's Anchor Team featured Michael McCormick, a former stenographer of the Biden administration. McCormick relates how he often saw ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick in the White House, and why he believes that McCarrick was instrumental in the selection of Francis as Pope.. He in turn relates how the "deep church" helped tilt the 2020 election to Biden.
From his vantage point, he stated that the election of Trump upended the plans that progressives had for the United States and ultimately western civilization. However, I am not going to rehash all the video's contents here. Suffice it to say that he puts forth a very optimistic view of the current trajectory of this nation. Please watch this.
I guardedly share this optimism, although caution is needed. I believe God has blessed us with the election of Trump. He certainly saved us from the unmitigated disaster that would have ensued, had Kackle-lot Harris won the White House. Many people, an ever-increasing amount of people have been praying their daily Rosaries as requested by Our Lady of Fatima. They have also been assisting at the Traditional Latin Mass. Lex orandi, lex crdendi, lex vivandi (forgive any misspellings of the Latin).
This is no time to grow complacent or to relax in our intercession for this world. Much sin, particularly against life, family, sexuality, still is prominent. There is overt hostility towards God and disregard for Our Lord's crucifixion and the salvation that He offers us. Keep up the prayer, keep up the momentum, keep up the work.
Tonight Michael and Alyssa Hichborn pondered the significance of naming Bishop McElroy a cardinal and how that plays into what appears to be Francis' larger schemes for fostering the great reset. As you listen to this, you will get the sense that we are at a fork in the road, the two directions being vastly different. The situation for western civilization looks grim, but not completely hopeless. The progressives wouldn't be thrashing about as they currently are, were they really smug about an inevitable victory. This is a clarion call to continue your Rosaries and other prayers.
A lot of calamities seem to be occurring all at once:
Draconian vaccine mandates
Papal attack against the Traditional Latin Mass
Illegal immigration run amok
Mid-east situation going south
And that's just a few problems. They all seem to be unrelated, don't they? They aren't - not by a long shot. Take a look at this from John Zmirak. For more food for thought, I post last week's Anchor Team.
Below is the episode of the Anchor Team that aired a few hours ago. I urge all to watch it. Truth be told, I've seem several people who were staunchly pro-life who embraced some of the liberal tenets of the Democrats. They have wavered quite a bit in their commitment to the babies. In their support of Biden, Clinton and other pro-abortion Democrats, they may have endangered their immortal souls.
Hichborn and Maughan draw some distinctions between the Democrats and the Republicans. I'm rather surprised they didn't touch on the news from Texas. The US Supreme Court let stand Texas' "heartbeat bill" that took effect today. It was a 5-4 decision. During his time in office, President Trump named 3 of those 5 to the Supreme Court. There are babies alive today because of those nominations. Would they have escaped abortionists' clutches had Hillary been in the White House? I think we all know the answer to that.
They do a reasonably good job in explaining Americanism. I wish they had spent more time in dispelling erroneous notions of Americanism that are found among some traditional Catholics. I might delve into that another time. Here is the video.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I often post episodes of The Anchor Team, produced by Michael Hichborn and the Lepanto Institute. Those podcasts happen on Friday evenings so I will post them on Fridays or maybe the following Saturdays. I for one have found them to be quite informative and helpful.
This evening Hichborn himself was away on family business. This evening's episode can only be described as ok, but somewhat odd. The title of the podcast is "Make Hollywood Great Again". Right off the bat we see a problem. Hollywood never was great. Much of what was produced was full of filth, having the effect of corrupting morals. That effect may well have been deliberated by freemasons who seem to seize any opportunity to bring about their new world order ends.
It had two characteristics that seemed to appeal to the populace at large. With some notable exceptions, the people who starred in their movies were physically attractive people who were often the objects of fantasies by their audiences. The second characteristic is that the watching of the films provided their audiences an escape from reality. Both these characteristics tended to render their audiences passive recipients of any message they may have wished to present. Much of the populace of western civilization were all too eager to lap up whatever Hollywood concocted for their consumption.
Not all were oblivious to the dangers of Hollywood. Good Christians of various stripes, mostly evangelical, preached against the movies and often forbade their congregations from attending. Perhaps the greatest moral force that succeeded in at least restraining Hollywood partially was the Catholic Church, through its Legion of Decency. At that time, the Church still held moral credibility. The Hollywood moguls knew that if the Legion declared a film to be objectionable, that Catholics would boycott it and revenues would take a tumble.
This was during the so-called "golden age of Hollywood". The fact that there was a need for the Legion of Decency to even exist should point to the evil that lurked in Hollywood. There were those films that didn't make the Legion's grade but were still released. But even the movies that were somewhat friendly to the Church misrepresented the Church. Those shortcomings might have been barely noticeable, but that made the errors even more likely to be introduced into audiences' minds. I believe they were deliberately insinuated to slowly introduce error into common thinking. The errors increased in frequency and intensity as the movie producers sensed that they would suffer no backlash from passive audiences.
It's some of those movies that were lauded in tonight's episode of the Anchor Team. I'll now post the video and below that will comment on some of the films
I won't remember them all, but here are a few.
Angels With Dirty Faces about two boyhood friends, one now a gangster and the other a priest. The gangster is idolized by some boys whom the priest is trying to keep from lives of crime. When the gangster is sentenced to the electric chair, the priest pays him one last visit. He asks the gangster to pretend that he's afraid to die, so that the boys will think him a coward not with emulating. Note two things. First, the priest asks him to lie, to sin against the Eighth Commandment. Maybe the reason was noble, but the ends don't justify the means. Second, and more egregiously, the priest doesn't even offer to hear the gangster's final confession. So the gangster goes to the chair with mortal sin on his soul. How well was the Church portrayed by that?
The Scarlet And The Black is based on the doings of Msgr Hugh O'Flaherty, a priest in the Vatican who hid thousands of Jews during the World War II holocaust. It directly feeds into the lie that Pope Pius XII was a coward when it came to assisting Jews. That lie was refuted by the Chief Rabbi of Rome who himself converted to Catholicism.
The Sound of Music supposedly based on the adventures of the Von Trapp family during World War II was so fictionalized that it aroused the ire of Maria Von Trapp. The Von Trapp family was not invited to the opening performance of the musical on Broadway.
I now realize when I described some characteristics of "golden age Hollywood" that I didn't touch upon the opulent and decadent lifestyles of the various stars. It was they who made divorce and remarriage seem quite normal. Their "parties" were often drunken orgies, some of it quite scandalous. We now know that abortion was quite rampant in that crowd; recall this was before Roe v Wade, when child murder was still considered a criminal act. They got away with all this because they had money.
So to that we should get back??? I should hope not!!! So many people want to step back fifty years in the past, failing to acknowledge that if such were possible, fifty years into that future we'd have the mess in which we currently find ourselves.
I highly recommend a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. He talks of the perils of passive reception of visual stimuli such as movies and television, even if the content is truly wholesome. At best, the viewer should always be cautioned to watch with his mind engaged and to never allow him/herself to be emotionally affected by the content. Saint Peter, in one of his epistles, exhorts us all to "watch always for the devil seeks to devour".
The present situation is rather unpleasant. But let's not romanticize the past that led us into our current mess.
Last Friday evening Michael Hichborn and Jim Maughan produced a video that documented why Vatican II, at best, produced no new pronouncements that are binding on the faithful. Those who argue for adherence to the "spirit of Vatican II" (whatever that is) can point to no specific item that requires our assent.
They delved into the background of Vatican II. Apparently Pope John XXIII entrusted Cardinal Ottaviani to produce some schemas to set the tone for the upcoming conference. Please understand that Cardinal Ottaviani was most definitely a voice for Tradition and the Deposit of Faith against Bugnini and others who were working to sabotage it. I believe he is the reason why Canon 1 of the Mass, that is, the original canon, remains at least as an option eligible for use. Most of the traditional-friendly priests who celebrate the Novus Ordo Mass will use that Canon on Solemnities and Feast days.
The progressives in the Vatican at the time (probably masons and/or agents planted by Bella Dodd and her colleagues) managed to have Ottaviani's schemas sidelined. It was thought that they were lost forever; fortunately that is not the case. Here they are. What happened to them should be none too surprising, given how Pope Francis disregarded input from the synods on the family and published his own prepared exhortations. In fact, someone pointed out how quickly after his hospitalization the pope was able to ram through Traditionis Custodes. Could that have been prepared before the pope's hospitalization and published for certain reasons? Vox Cantoris has a hypothesis on that matter.
Given that theory about the pope's precarious health situation, it does seem reasonable to believe that he is fast-tracking the destruction of the Mass to turn it into a vehicle for this one-world-order dictatorship. We know from Our Lord and Our Lady that the ultimate triumph will be theirs, but in the meantime, many souls will be put in danger of damnation. We must be prayerful and ever ready to act and speak out.
