The Battle against the dragon, and Mary. Homily by Msgr. Viganò.

20 Maggio 2023 Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti

Marco Tosatti

Dear friends and foes of Stilum Curiae, we receive and gladly publish this homily by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Happy reading and sharing.

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HOMILY

Admiramini, gaudete: Christus facti sumus.

S.cti Augustini, In Johann. Evang. Tract. , 21, 8

The divine liturgy of this votive Mass in honor of Mary Most Holy, under the title of Regina Crucis, proposes to us in the Epistle the vision of the Apocalypse of the Woman and the Dragon, which offers this solemn celebration great and important points of reflection.

The Woman represents Mary Most Holy and therefore the Church, of which she is Queen and Mother, since she is Mother of Our Lord and God, Head of the Mystical Body, and spiritual Mother of Christians, who are living members of that Body. Under her virginal feet, the Woman tramples on the moon, thus symbolizing contempt for transient and changing things as opposed to the immutable eternity of God. She is clothed with the Sun of Justice, that is, placed under the protection of Christ, and wears a crown of twelve stars, the twelve Apostles who are the jewels of the Church. Her cries for the pains of childbirth allude to the fact that the Holy Church – as well as Mary Most Holy – gives birth to the children of God into the life of Grace, uniting their sorrows in Compassion and Harmony to the Passion and Redemption of Christ, thus meriting for the Virgin the title of Queen of the Cross. The Virgin Mary was with Christ when He called himself, from the Cross, Sovereign of the world; and at the foot of the Cross she clothed herself in the royal mantle of perfect sorrow, allowing herself to be pierced and crowned, holding the scepter of suffering with her divine Son.

The Church – of which Mary is the Mother – also begets the dearest of their children: priests, ministers of the Sun and of Blood, as Saint Catherine of Siena called them. Their birth recalls the Dragon, or Satan, because he wants to tear them to pieces in order to prevent them from mystically renewing the Sacrifice of the Cross, through which the Lord has restored to the supernatural order what Adam’s sin merited to be lost. And ever since the expulsion of our first parents, the promise of the Protoevangelium (Gen 3:15) unfailingly refers to the vision of the Apocalypse, in which the battle between Christ and Satan is re-proposed, between the offspring of Christ, which is the Church, and the offspring of Satan, which is the antichurch or the Masonic globalist Sanhedrin.

I recall your attention to the threefold assault of the Dragon: the first assault is against Jesus Christ, the newborn Son of the Woman (Rev 12:5), who escapes from the Dragon’s attacks by being raptured into heaven; the second assault is against the Woman (Rev 12:6), who flees into the desert – an allegory for a place protected from the assaults of Satan – for a period of 1260 days, or 42 months or 3 1/2 years, that is, the time of the reign of the Antichrist (Rev 12:6 and 14); the third assault is against the children of the Woman, that is, Christians and the Church, but they obtain victory over the Dragon thanks to the Blood of the Lamb (Rev 12:11).

I find this threefold distinction of Satan’s assault very edifying and meaningful: we see that the devil always attacks Christ, first in His Person, then in His Mystical Body, and finally in His faithful. Yet, the victory that the Lord wants to obtain is realized only in the third assault: And the dragon was angry against the Woman, and he went to make war on the rest of his descendants, on those who kept the commandments of God and have at heart the testimony of Jesus (Rev 12:17). Who are they? Of whom does Saint John speak when he alludes to the descendants of the Woman, if not of those who have remained faithful and have not apostatized the Faith, nor have allowed themselves to be swept away by the tail of the Dragon (Rev 12:4)? It is a great consolation to see how the Lord is pleased to call His children to fight in the battle against Satan, so that thanks to their generous abandonment to God’s will they may become docile instruments of Christ’s triumph over the one who was a murderer from the beginning (Jn 8:44). The Lord does not want to win alone: He wants His victory to be ours too, if we take the field under the banners of Christ our King and Mary our Queen, who have purchased us back – Christ in His Passion and Redemption and Mary Most Holy through her Compassion and Co-redemption – from our state as slaves of the devil. And behold again the Cross, on which the King is seated and at whose feet stands the Queen Mother; a Queen and Mother of every baptized person, but especially of every priest, whom the Lord has entrusted to her as Her valiant subjects and devoted children.

Let us not be surprised, therefore, by the Dragon’s fierce hatred of the children of the Church, who are all spiritual children of Mary Most Holy: that hatred is a reflection of hatred of the Church herself, of the Immaculate Virgin and of the Son of God, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us rather be surprised if the Dragon does not try to devour us, because it would mean that he does not see Christ in us and that he does not consider us an obstacle in the war he wages against God. Let us be surprised rather if the Dragon’s servants treat us as their friends, because from this we must understand that we are acting and thinking according to the spirit of the world, and not according to the Spirit of God.

That is why in this corrupt and rebellious society, enslaved to Evil by an elite that is perverted in mind and will, the Dragon of the antichurch has been so unleashed against Priests: it knows very well how fearsome they are, because in their hands the Lord has placed the divine power to consecrate the Body and Blood of Christ, to offer the Immaculate Victim to the Father in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to perpetuate the river of graces and blessings that protects the Woman who has taken refuge in the desert, the image of the Church. Everything revolves around the Cross, because it is there that Satan has been defeated by Our Lord, it is there that His Most Holy Mother, united to the Passion of the Son, trampled on the head of the Serpent as promised in the Protoevangelium. It is there that the Mother of the Church shows herself terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata – terrible as an army set in battle array – against the chaos of the infernal hordes that besiege the Citadel.

Priesthood, Mass, Eucharist, Mary Most Holy: these foundations of our religion are daily attacked by the devil and his servants. The priesthood, because the sanctifying action of her Head continues in the Church; the Mass, which is the principal action of the priesthood; the Most Holy Eucharist, which makes Christ truly present under the sacred Species who becomes spiritual nourishment towards the heavenly homeland; the Virgin Mary, living tabernacle of the Most High and model of that holy humility which overturns the pride of Lucifer.

Certainly, we should tremble for the fate of those who, blinded by sin, rail against what is most effective in facing this battle. And we should be horrified to hear the one who sits on the Throne of the Vicar of Christ accuse as “indietrismo” – backwardness – the guarding of the deposit of faith, as rigidity fidelity to the teaching of Our Lord, and as formalismobedience to what Our Lord taught the Apostles. Because those ranting words, those delirious declarations that have been multiplying for ten years in the narcotized silence of the Hierarchy, of the clerics and of the faithful constitute the most evident and disconcerting proof of the alien nature of Bergoglio, of his extraneousness to the role he holds, indeed of his obvious aversion to everything that is Catholic, Apostolic and Roman; to all that most intimately realizes the presence of Christ the King and High Priest: the priesthood, the Mass, the Eucharist. As well as aversion to the one who is Mother of the Church and Queen of the Cross. Our blood freezes in our veins when we hear the doctrine of the Co-redemption and Mediation of Mary Most Holy described as “nonsense.”

No, dear brothers: we are not “sick of nostalgia,” because we are not – and we ought not be – of the world, but rather inthe world. Because the words of Our Lord are not subject to fashions or the passage of time: veritas Domini manet in æternum. We do not long for a distant era, a golden age gone by, because we know well that the battle between Christ and Satan that began in the earthly Paradise is destined to continue and to intensify the closer comes, inexorably, the redde rationem of the last times, which will see the Archangel St. Michael drive Satan and his minions back, for the second time and forever, into the abyss. Ours is not an attachment to the past, but rather to what is eternal. It is not a way of escaping the challenges of the present by taking refuge in an oasis of aestheticism, because if it were so – and it is, as we know, for some so-called conservative communities – we would be guilty of trading form for substance, compromising on principles in order to preserve their external appearances.

Let us look at what is happening in this crucial phase of the history of humanity and of the life of the Church with realism and without letting ourselves be deceived: we have come very close to the end times, and perhaps those three and a half years during which the Woman will flee into the desert are not as remote as we might wish. Three and a half years in which the Antichrist will reign supreme over the world, persecuting and martyring the faithful in the indifference of the world, in the silence of the media, in the complicit carelessness of false shepherds. Indeed, by their stolid and sordid complicity, which manifests their true intentions and, what is worse, their betrayal of Our Lord.

If you are the Son of God, come down from the Cross: the hierarchs of the conciliar sect repeat these words when, abusing their power as the High Priests of the Sanhedrin, they would like to cancel the Priesthood instituted by Christ by transforming the priest into an official, prevent the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by corrupting it in a convivial banquet, and profane the Most Holy Eucharist by admitting to Communion those who are not worthy to receive it. Come down from the Cross, they cry out: that is, do not bring to completion the Redemption that we fear so much. Come down from the altar, they warn today: so that that Redemption may not be perpetuated and extended in time, so that the Sacrifice of one thousand nine hundred and ninety years ago remains confined to the past, is made sterile and unproductive like the talent buried in the field by the unfaithful servant. We are not the backward ones, those who are sick with nostalgia: it is rather they who look with horror at the reality of their own war that was already lost then and try in every way to prevent the triumph of Christ – after having failed the assault against Him and against the Woman clothed with the sun – striking today the children of the Church, the children of Mary Most Holy.

How can we conquer the Dragon? Thanks to the blood of the Lamb and the word of their witness (Rev 12:11): thanks to the Mass, which still pours out the most precious Blood abundantly today for the salvation of souls; thanks to the Priesthood, which makes Mass possible and spreads the word of witness by preaching; thanks to the Most Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of the Lamb. And thanks to the Woman, the image of Mary Most Holy and of the Church, in whose interior Our Lord was formed and from whose womb the children of God are spiritually born.

Let us look at the events sub specie æternitatis: this is the only way that we can understand the deception of those who act according to the mentality of the world – whose Prince is Satan – and be able counteract it. And let us not renounce being as the Lord wants us, rather than as the mercenaries and wolves in sheep’s clothing would like us to be in their “pastoral vision.” The words of the Venerable Pontiff Pius XII respond on our behalf against the umpteenth disconcerting and scandalous utterance of Bergoglio: Behind those who accuse the Church of being rigid there is only the perversion of the False Prophet, who attacks the Truth of Christ himself. And so may it be.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

May 20, 2023

Sabbato infra Octavam Ascensionis