Church Militant The Vortex Feed

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary.

David Knight interviews Michael Voris Oct. 4 about why being a Christian nationalist is a good thing.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary.

David Knight interviews Michael Voris Oct. 4 about the evil of government indoctrination centers, also known as public schools.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

TRANSCRIPT

One of the largest challenges — perhaps the largest — media outfits have is how to present and package information we have.

Some might think we'll just write an article and publish it. Not so much. Industry standards have shown for decades now that a vast majority of people only read the headline.

A few more read the first paragraph, and, after that, unless the reader is very interested in the story already, most people stop. Reading has been on the decline in America for years, but that has been accelerated with the advent of short-attention-span social media blurbs and video.

In short, very large numbers of people prefer to watch and listen, as opposed to read. That's why Church Militant has been dedicated to video/TV presentation since our very first day.

It is also why all sorts of other Catholic media outlets have followed our lead and committed resources to video as well, with podcasts and interviews and all that. Video presentations, for better or worse, connect with the average Joe much more so than reading.

People see other people on their screens. They see another human face, like theirs (like they do in their everyday lives), and they respond — positively or negatively. People simply identify with another face more than they do words on a page or screen.

So the face, the person, the presentation becomes the vehicle for conveying the idea.

So in this world, this is always the challenge. How to take the idea, the information, and package it together so that message is conveyed as best as possible, within the limits imposed by day-to-day reality.

The more sophisticated or involved the presentation is, the costlier it becomes, generally speaking. 

But if we want to reach people, this is just part of the equation. It's how the Marxists have been so extraordinarily successful in their quest to corrupt minds. They know the power of the visual, and they execute that power very well.

So we here at Church Militant are always engaged in this activity. To that end, we are producing a new program we call The Daily Beat. It originally airs in the last part of Evening News live each night — where we are able to take viewer questions live.

But after Evening News has aired, we lift it out of its spot there and duplicate it as its own standalone show, making it available that way as well. We rolled it out earlier this week, and we'd like to introduce it to you now.

We'd like to remind you all this is possible only through your continuing support, for which we thank you.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

TRANSCRIPT

The Church is in a disastrous state.

Many bishops don't believe the Faith. They certainly don't care about souls. They have destroyed countless souls. Anyone with a brain can see this. It is undeniable.

The question isn't, Is this all true? It has been asked and answered multiple times. The question is, What do we do?

Among those who are most distressed over the current crisis — and yes, it is a giant crisis — there is too often a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They turn uncritically and unthinkingly to anything that proposes itself to be a remedy to the crisis.

As a result, the sense of "tradition" gets bandied about as some kind of silver bullet cure-all for everything ailing the Church.

However, "tradition" means different things to different people — who, again, have to properly understand the nature of the crisis. For example, there is a naive belief that if it happened before Vatican II and if it was accepted before Vatican II, then it must be rushed into headlong.

While that instinct is certainly understandable, it's wrong — dead wrong.

We aren't talking about Church teaching, we're talking about the approach to the Church. For faithful Catholics who cling to tradition, properly understood, they also cling to wrongheaded traditions that come along for the ride.

For example, there is the approach to the priesthood. Faithful Catholics treasure the priesthood. It is the priesthood that brings us Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist, bestows absolution for our sins and so forth. All that is a tradition.

But coming along with that is an approach to individual priests that is completely wrongheaded. Just because a priest wears a cassock all the time and offers the Latin Mass does not make him holy.

McCarrick started out wearing a cassock, was ordained in the Old Rite — and was raping seminarians left and right. Cardinal Spellman of New York, who raised McCarrick from the dust and set his feet on the path of careerism, wore a cassock, loved the lace, was solidly orthodox in his preachings, offered the Latin Mass — and was reportedly massively homosexual.

We move to Joseph Bernardin, who was not only homosexual but also involved in Satanism. Bernardin wore his cassock, was ordained in the Latin rite, offered the Latin Mass and was notorious.

So it goes. In fact, every single bishop at Vatican II pre-existed the Council, quite obviously. Each was made bishop by totally solid popes.

So, how did things go so sideways?

To delude yourself that all was good before Vatican II, and therefore everything in the Church before that needs to be emulated today, is simply just that: delusional. In fact, the argument can easily be made that the seminaries prior to Vatican II were the breeding grounds for the homosexuality that eventually burst onto the scene with Catholic clergy starting in the 1960s.

If everything was so hunky dory before 1965, how was it that so many religious — male and female — simply abandoned their vows and religious communities so quickly? Why was Mass attendance in France already in a freefall, with fewer than half of Catholics in the Eldest Daughter of the Church actually going to Mass?

The fact that there are massive problems today — seemingly almost insurmountable — does not discount that there were very serious problems back then as well.

So to want to "turn back the clock" to before 1965 is a wrongheaded approach.

Regarding the laity, within three years of the council ending, Catholics all over the West ignored the teaching on contraception and embraced the Culture of Death. That speaks directly to a huge lack of catechesis. There is just no way a well-prepared and instructed laity would walk away from the Church, in such huge numbers and in such a short period of time, if they had been properly instructed. It's not possible.

This brings us to the dangers of the "mad, rad, trad" world today. No, we aren't speaking of normal Catholics who have an affinity for the Old Rite. We are talking specifically about the crowd members who can't reason their way out of a bag on these issues.

They are mad about the current state of affairs. With reason.

They are radical in grasping onto anything and everything just because it predates 1965. They wrap it all up in the term "tradition" without making the necessary distinction between teaching and approach to the Church.

What else could explain the brain-dead approach to the case of Fr. James Jackson of the FSSP by the mad, rad, trad crowd?

He was arrested last year and charged by the feds with child pornography — not just your run-of-the-mill child porn, but actually involving infants and animals. He was re-arrested in July on what amounts to the same charges and basically admitted in legal pleadings in court last week that the government's case could easily be made against him.

The case sent shock waves through the mad, rad, trad crowd, who immediately went into hyper-overdrive, declaring that it had to be a conspiracy organized by Pope Francis and Joe Biden; or demons were present in his computer wiring; or it had been planted by nefarious people who didn't like his traditional veneer. One even joked it was aliens. 

I didn't know the mad, rad, trads even believed in aliens.

They spouted any ridiculous nonsense they could come up with, because in the language of one of the most prolific deniers among them, no priest who says the Latin Mass could possibly be guilty of this. He would be holy and incapable of such filth. There's some circular logic for you.

One notorious blogger even collected about $140,000 from the mad, rad, trad crowd, declaring he would get to the bottom of all this.

Mike Parrott, of the Restoring the Faith media blog, told his followers he would get his hands on the evidence (which was the computers and hard drives) and turn it over to a computing forensic expert to perform his own independent examination of them. In short, he would defend the Church (insert chest thump).

Of course, he had no access to anything he claimed, and no forensic computing was ever performed. Still, that didn't stop the mad, rad, trad crowd from donating all that money — so willing to believe that there was just no way any of this could be true.

When Church Militant, journalistically curious about his claims of getting his hands on the prosecution's evidence and soliciting donations to pay for it, contacted him and asked some typical questions, he and the mad, rad, trad world went bananas. They blew up social media, saying our journalism was unreliable and like the National Enquirer, that we hated tradition, and on and on.

The charge was led by Mike Parrott, who didn't like us posing questions about him collecting $140,000 under the pretense of getting his hands on the state's evidence to conduct a private analysis. The attacks got so bad, defaming our journalistic integrity, that we had to sue him. It was settled a couple of weeks ago, with Parrott having to pay us for some of our legal expenses and issuing a recorded apology.

The point of all this is to say that the mad, rad, trads are off the hook — promoting schism and attacking other Catholics who don't share their insanity.

This crowd has come to support the schismatic movement of excommunicated archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. For the record, three popes in a row — John Paul, Benedict and Francis — have officially declared the SSPX movement schismatic. But the mad, rad, trad crowd, while claiming loyalty and fidelity to the Church, gives the finger to those declarations. It has officially condemned the Novus Ordo Mass as "evil" and actually "re-ordained" priests who joined the movement after being ordained in the New Rite.

The SSPX has its own hierarchy and its own annulment courts. In short, it has established itself as its own church. But hey, they say the Latin Mass, so ignore all of that.

The entire movement within the Church — brought about in reaction to the evil of the hierarchy for the past half-century — is little else than Protestantism speaking Latin.

Sadly, well-known Catholic media sites and Catholic YouTube personalities are signing on to this agenda, directly or subtly suggesting Vatican II wasn't legitimate, Francis is a heretic and the Novus Ordo Mass isn't valid.

These outfits and personalities have found cash cows in some wealthy backers, who throw their money to promote this agenda. So they tailor their stories and talking points to those donors. Don't be taken in by them, no matter how familiar you are with them and may have even liked them in the past.

You don't get to tell three popes in a row to go jump in the lake, treat valid sacraments as though they are worthless and then re-administer them, declare yourself "Eternal Rome" and still claim to be Catholic, just because you have a pre-1965 calendar on your wall.

One thing, however, that the schismatic members did manage to import from the post-1965 era was the penchant for clerical sex abuse and their bishops covering it all up, as multiple investigations have proven. Ignoring or apologizing for sex abuse — in effect, aiding the cover-up — is now becoming commonplace with these same media outlets in the trad world.

Just like the post-1965 bishops became quite expert at lying, as well as enlisting multiple lay people to continue the lies, so too has the SSPX lied through its teeth even to this day, denying and deflecting with the best of any modernist bishop.

Praying in Latin does not make a priest or a layman "holy."

But in their unthinking, uncritical, emotional, off-the-rails response to the crisis, the mad, rad, trad crowd feels completely justified in lying, smearing, stealing and attacking anyone who dares challenge them and their tradition.

The mad, rad, trad crowd's understanding of "tradition" is not one to be emulated. Breaking away from the Church while claiming to be loyal to the Church is a non-starter. This crowd has created a cottage industry out of it. Given the current insanity coming from the hierarchy, they are able to advertise themselves as a splendid alternative, with incense and candles and Latin.

But they conveniently leave disobedience out of their messaging, as well as denying the validity of sacraments not performed by their clergy. 

Their leader is excommunicated. Their current leaders cover up sex abuse on an international level. Their followers lie so intensely, they need to be sued and made to pay damages to be forced to tell the truth.

Yes, the Church is in a crisis, perhaps the greatest one in 2,000 years. But joining a schismatic movement, no matter how "traditional" it looks or claims to be, is never the answer.

The answer is to do what faithful Catholics do and have always done — stay and fight.

Read our FAQ on the canonical position of the SSPX.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

TRANSCRIPT

The Church is in a disastrous state.

Many bishops don't believe the Faith. They certainly don't care about souls. They have destroyed countless souls. Anyone with a brain can see this. It is undeniable.

The question isn't, Is this all true? It has been asked and answered multiple times. The question is, What do we do?

Among those who are most distressed over the current crisis — and yes, it is a giant crisis — there is too often a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They turn uncritically and unthinkingly to anything that proposes itself to be a remedy to the crisis.

As a result, the sense of "tradition" gets bandied about as some kind of silver bullet cure-all for everything ailing the Church.

However, "tradition" means different things to different people — who, again, have to properly understand the nature of the crisis. For example, there is a naive belief that if it happened before Vatican II and if it was accepted before Vatican II, then it must be rushed into headlong.

While that instinct is certainly understandable, it's wrong — dead wrong.

We aren't talking about Church teaching, we're talking about the approach to the Church. For faithful Catholics who cling to tradition, properly understood, they also cling to wrongheaded traditions that come along for the ride.

For example, there is the approach to the priesthood. Faithful Catholics treasure the priesthood. It is the priesthood that brings us Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist, bestows absolution for our sins and so forth. All that is a tradition.

But coming along with that is an approach to individual priests that is completely wrongheaded. Just because a priest wears a cassock all the time and offers the Latin Mass does not make him holy.

McCarrick started out wearing a cassock, was ordained in the Old Rite — and was raping seminarians left and right. Cardinal Spellman of New York, who raised McCarrick from the dust and set his feet on the path of careerism, wore a cassock, loved the lace, was solidly orthodox in his preachings, offered the Latin Mass — and was reportedly massively homosexual.

We move to Joseph Bernardin, who was not only homosexual but also involved in Satanism. Bernardin wore his cassock, was ordained in the Latin rite, offered the Latin Mass and was notorious.

So it goes. In fact, every single bishop at Vatican II pre-existed the Council, quite obviously. Each was made bishop by totally solid popes.

So, how did things go so sideways?

To delude yourself that all was good before Vatican II, and therefore everything in the Church before that needs to be emulated today, is simply just that: delusional. In fact, the argument can easily be made that the seminaries prior to Vatican II were the breeding grounds for the homosexuality that eventually burst onto the scene with Catholic clergy starting in the 1960s.

If everything was so hunky dory before 1965, how was it that so many religious — male and female — simply abandoned their vows and religious communities so quickly? Why was Mass attendance in France already in a freefall, with fewer than half of Catholics in the Eldest Daughter of the Church actually going to Mass?

The fact that there are massive problems today — seemingly almost insurmountable — does not discount that there were very serious problems back then as well.

So to want to "turn back the clock" to before 1965 is a wrongheaded approach.

Regarding the laity, within three years of the council ending, Catholics all over the West ignored the teaching on contraception and embraced the Culture of Death. That speaks directly to a huge lack of catechesis. There is just no way a well-prepared and instructed laity would walk away from the Church, in such huge numbers and in such a short period of time, if they had been properly instructed. It's not possible.

This brings us to the dangers of the "mad, rad, trad" world today. No, we aren't speaking of normal Catholics who have an affinity for the Old Rite. We are talking specifically about the crowd members who can't reason their way out of a bag on these issues.

They are mad about the current state of affairs. With reason.

They are radical in grasping onto anything and everything just because it predates 1965. They wrap it all up in the term "tradition" without making the necessary distinction between teaching and approach to the Church.

What else could explain the brain-dead approach to the case of Fr. James Jackson of the FSSP by the mad, rad, trad crowd?

He was arrested last year and charged by the feds with child pornography — not just your run-of-the-mill child porn, but actually involving infants and animals. He was re-arrested in July on what amounts to the same charges and basically admitted in legal pleadings in court last week that the government's case could easily be made against him.

The case sent shock waves through the mad, rad, trad crowd, who immediately went into hyper-overdrive, declaring that it had to be a conspiracy organized by Pope Francis and Joe Biden; or demons were present in his computer wiring; or it had been planted by nefarious people who didn't like his traditional veneer. One even joked it was aliens. 

I didn't know the mad, rad, trads even believed in aliens.

They spouted any ridiculous nonsense they could come up with, because in the language of one of the most prolific deniers among them, no priest who says the Latin Mass could possibly be guilty of this. He would be holy and incapable of such filth. There's some circular logic for you.

One notorious blogger even collected about $140,000 from the mad, rad, trad crowd, declaring he would get to the bottom of all this.

Mike Parrott, of the Restoring the Faith media blog, told his followers he would get his hands on the evidence (which was the computers and hard drives) and turn it over to a computing forensic expert to perform his own independent examination of them. In short, he would defend the Church (insert chest thump).

Of course, he had no access to anything he claimed, and no forensic computing was ever performed. Still, that didn't stop the mad, rad, trad crowd from donating all that money — so willing to believe that there was just no way any of this could be true.

When Church Militant, journalistically curious about his claims of getting his hands on the prosecution's evidence and soliciting donations to pay for it, contacted him and asked some typical questions, he and the mad, rad, trad world went bananas. They blew up social media, saying our journalism was unreliable and like the National Enquirer, that we hated tradition, and on and on.

The charge was led by Mike Parrott, who didn't like us posing questions about him collecting $140,000 under the pretense of getting his hands on the state's evidence to conduct a private analysis. The attacks got so bad, defaming our journalistic integrity, that we had to sue him. It was settled a couple of weeks ago, with Parrott having to pay us for some of our legal expenses and issuing a recorded apology.

The point of all this is to say that the mad, rad, trads are off the hook — promoting schism and attacking other Catholics who don't share their insanity.

This crowd has come to support the schismatic movement of excommunicated archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. For the record, three popes in a row — John Paul, Benedict and Francis — have officially declared the SSPX movement schismatic. But the mad, rad, trad crowd, while claiming loyalty and fidelity to the Church, gives the finger to those declarations. It has officially condemned the Novus Ordo Mass as "evil" and actually "re-ordained" priests who joined the movement after being ordained in the New Rite.

The SSPX has its own hierarchy and its own annulment courts. In short, it has established itself as its own church. But hey, they say the Latin Mass, so ignore all of that.

The entire movement within the Church — brought about in reaction to the evil of the hierarchy for the past half-century — is little else than Protestantism speaking Latin.

Sadly, well-known Catholic media sites and Catholic YouTube personalities are signing on to this agenda, directly or subtly suggesting Vatican II wasn't legitimate, Francis is a heretic and the Novus Ordo Mass isn't valid.

These outfits and personalities have found cash cows in some wealthy backers, who throw their money to promote this agenda. So they tailor their stories and talking points to those donors. Don't be taken in by them, no matter how familiar you are with them and may have even liked them in the past.

You don't get to tell three popes in a row to go jump in the lake, treat valid sacraments as though they are worthless and then re-administer them, declare yourself "Eternal Rome" and still claim to be Catholic, just because you have a pre-1965 calendar on your wall.

One thing, however, that the schismatic members did manage to import from the post-1965 era was the penchant for clerical sex abuse and their bishops covering it all up, as multiple investigations have proven. Ignoring or apologizing for sex abuse — in effect, aiding the cover-up — is now becoming commonplace with these same media outlets in the trad world.

Just like the post-1965 bishops became quite expert at lying, as well as enlisting multiple lay people to continue the lies, so too has the SSPX lied through its teeth even to this day, denying and deflecting with the best of any modernist bishop.

Praying in Latin does not make a priest or a layman "holy."

But in their unthinking, uncritical, emotional, off-the-rails response to the crisis, the mad, rad, trad crowd feels completely justified in lying, smearing, stealing and attacking anyone who dares challenge them and their tradition.

The mad, rad, trad crowd's understanding of "tradition" is not one to be emulated. Breaking away from the Church while claiming to be loyal to the Church is a non-starter. This crowd has created a cottage industry out of it. Given the current insanity coming from the hierarchy, they are able to advertise themselves as a splendid alternative, with incense and candles and Latin.

But they conveniently leave disobedience out of their messaging, as well as denying the validity of sacraments not performed by their clergy. 

Their leader is excommunicated. Their current leaders cover up sex abuse on an international level. Their followers lie so intensely, they need to be sued and made to pay damages to be forced to tell the truth.

Yes, the Church is in a crisis, perhaps the greatest one in 2,000 years. But joining a schismatic movement, no matter how "traditional" it looks or claims to be, is never the answer.

The answer is to do what faithful Catholics do and have always done — stay and fight.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

TRANSCRIPT

One of the largest challenges — perhaps the largest — media outfits have is how to present and package information we have.

Some might think we'll just write an article and publish it. Not so much. Industry standards have shown for decades now that a vast majority of people only read the headline.

A few more read the first paragraph, and, after that, unless the reader is very interested in the story already, most people stop. Reading has been on the decline in America for years, but that has been accelerated with the advent of short-attention-span social media blurbs and video.

In short, very large numbers of people prefer to watch and listen, as opposed to read. That's why Church Militant has been dedicated to video/TV presentation since our very first day.

It is also why all sorts of other Catholic media outlets have followed our lead and committed resources to video as well, with podcasts and interviews and all that. Video presentations, for better or worse, connect with the average Joe much more so than reading.

People see other people on their screens. They see another human face, like theirs (like they do in their everyday lives), and they respond — positively or negatively. People simply identify with another face more than they do words on a page or screen.

So the face, the person, the presentation becomes the vehicle for conveying the idea.

So in this world, this is always the challenge. How to take the idea, the information, and package it together so that message is conveyed as best as possible, within the limits imposed by day-to-day reality.

The more sophisticated or involved the presentation is, the costlier it becomes, generally speaking. 

But if we want to reach people, this is just part of the equation. It's how the Marxists have been so extraordinarily successful in their quest to corrupt minds. They know the power of the visual, and they execute that power very well.

So we here at Church Militant are always engaged in this activity. To that end, we are producing a new program we call The Daily Beat. It originally airs in the last part of Evening News live each night — where we are able to take viewer questions live.

But after Evening News has aired, we lift it out of its spot there and duplicate it as its own standalone show, making it available that way as well. We rolled it out earlier this week, and we'd like to introduce it to you now.

We'd like to remind you all this is possible only through your continuing support, for which we thank you.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary.

David Knight interviews Michael Voris Oct. 4 about the evil of government indoctrination centers, also known as public schools.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary.

David Knight interviews Michael Voris Oct. 4 about why being a Christian nationalist is a good thing.

Please consider donating using the form below to further advance the mission.

TRANSCRIPT

When companies are doing internal reviews and want to know what their customers think of them, their products and their services, it's typical that they conduct market surveys.

The surveys come in all kinds, shapes and forms — from focus groups to incentive emails to online surveys, and so forth.

Recently, a company sent out a survey and asked the following questions of its patrons:

As companies "dig down" into their customers' likes and dislikes (and then, broader opinions and thoughts), they often ask these types of questions. And then, whatever they are able to implement from these surveys, they do.

After all, you've got to keep the customer happy, because a happy customer is a repeat customer. Now, a little confession: The "company" that sent out the survey was a diocese asking Catholics those questions and a few others. 

This is precisely why Catholic, Inc. is failing. It sees itself in corporate terms, not spiritual. Nowhere on the survey was there even the slightest attempt to try and see if the "customers" understand what the Church is or, more exactly, who the Church is.

Every single question on that survey (and the possible choices) is reflective of a bishop and his staff who have zero comprehension of the Church as She is constituted in Herself. Consider that for more than half a century, the hierarchy has failed to teach that most salient point, the nature of the Church ("ecclesiology" is its proper name).

Then 50-plus years later, after having corrupted the minds of its customers by depriving them of the truth, a bishop shoots out a marketing survey asking them their thoughts about the Church — meaning, their feelings about it.

Do they like everyone's voice being valued? Do they like listening to one another? Do they like joint discernment and decision-making, dialoguing with society? What in hades do any of those terms even mean? They are completely stupid — just like the survey itself, the people who wrote it and the person who approved it.

This has nothing to do with eternal salvation. It's a customer survey designed to discover the likes and dislikes of the customer base and then make appropriate changes to the product according to the survey results.

In fact, given the inane questions — the wording, the choice of phrases, the vocabulary — the whole thing can be likened to Henry Ford's famous quip when marketing his Model T: "You can have it in any color you like, as long as it's black."

The survey is designed to elicit responses that have zero relationship to the truth. Who cares if someone doesn't feel everyone's voice is valued? Some voices should not be valued at all.

In fact, far from being valued, some voices should be expelled from the Church — Fr. James Martin; Cdls. Cupich, McElroy and Tobin; virtually the entire German Bishops' Conference; need we continue?

For all the bluster about "all voices being valued," go ask your local chancery if Church Militant's voice can be valued at the next diocesan men's conference.

This is all part of the smokescreen of remaking the Church — pretending to be listening to the people of God when all that's being heard is just an echo chamber of faithless prelates hearing back their theological insanity from the past half-century.

Since when did fellowship take priority over the sacraments? Since when did my voice gain greater importance than the Cross? This garbage is off the rails.

These surveys are being conducted in dioceses all over the world, with the results collated and then forwarded to Rome for inclusion in next year's agenda for the Synod on Synods — even the name is stupid.

Synods don't replace Church teaching, even if they have a billion questionnaires that prove nothing other than the gross failures of their bishops.

That will, however, be the one redeeming factor of the great big universal synod: It will produce living proof of just how much the hierarchy itself has rejected the Faith. It won't be the first time in Church history, and if mankind lives long enough, it likely will not be the last.

But we weren't alive during the Arian heresy. We also will not be alive during whatever future heresy swamps the bishops decades or centuries from now. We are alive in this one. That demands a response from us, here and now.

This is fool's gold. It's Protestant, building a religion around the emotional whims of the "people of God," collated from a series of worldwide surveys and decades of being malformed in the Faith. The Church as She is constituted in Herself is under divine protection. Individual members of the hierarchy, as well as the collective people of God the way they mean it, however, are not.

When Our Blessed Lord's visible body went into the tomb, His followers mourned, were near despair and had given up hope. Only His Mother believed — she hoped, and not just hoped but hoped supernaturally. 

She alone kept the candle of faith alive. You could say, in a certain sense, that for those three days the entire Church was subsumed into her.

Our Lord's visible presence here on earth once again appears to be going into the tomb. This will call for a deep faith, a supernatural faith — a "man of steel" approach to His promise that He will not leave us orphans.

In this month of the Holy Rosary, emulate the Mother of Christ, who did not despair but sat keeping vigil, waiting to see her Divine Son again on Easter morning.

Mary Magdalene was the first public witness to the Resurrection, but it is held by innumerable Fathers and Doctors of the Church, along with multitudes of saints, that the first to behold His resurrected, glorified body was His Blessed Mother — a uniting of Himself to her in a singular way. Yes, in exchange for her deep sorrow, but also as a reward for her abiding faith and hope, motivated by her love for Him.

What son, having witnessed the agony of his own mother at his sufferings and death, would not appear to her first, to bring her agony and sadness to an end?

G.K. Chesterton made the comment once that the Church has died many times in its millennia-long existence, only to be resurrected by God again and again. Hold on to that thought, that realization, that hope, as we descend into the tomb yet again.

We will not be there forever. As Psalm 16:10 says, "you will not leave my soul among the dead, nor suffer your beloved to know decay."

Today's Vortex is the keynote speech Michael Voris gave at Church Militant's 2022 Call to Action convention.