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Milestone at Veritatis

Sheryl CollmerLeave a comment

Masses Begin at Veritatis Splendor

First Mass in the Chapel of the Holy Family

With the debut of daily and Sunday Masses at Veritatis Splendor, the idealistic community up in Winona has sprung back onto the radar screens of east Texas Catholics. For a while, people wondered if the intentional Catholic community would die a quiet death from having bitten off too big a bite. Neighborhoods, schools, recreational facilities, a High Italian Gothic-style church… I mean, really! Somewhere north of nowhere?

But a steady tide of building activity has been going on all year, and there are some days that the property looks like a giant anthill, trucks and flatbeds plying back and forth as pipe is laid, foundations poured and building materials delivered. Infrastructure to support the first phase of neighborhoods is near completion, and lot owners have begun constructing and living on their properties. And now, the opening of the Chapel for public Mass is a major milestone in the life of Veritatis Splendor.

Fr. Stephen Thompson, main celebrant and homilist at the opening Mass

The Holy Family Chapel was completed last month, and the first Mass was celebrated on September 29, the feast of the Holy Archangels, with Bishop Strickland present. The chapel is small, to tide over the worshipping community until the magnificent Oratory on the Hill can be built, still some years in the future. The chapel seats around 50, with overflow seating for another 50. It’s a church-shaped building, constructed within a larger metal barn. It reminds me of the Holy House of Loreto, the tiny cottage where the Virgin Mary was said to have conceived of the Holy Spirit, which is now enclosed within a much larger basilica.

The Chapel is very much a “country church” with stained pine walls and aged wooden pews, with elegant highlights in the trim of the roof beams, the lovely fixtures reclaimed from older churches, and of course, the tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament. It is a humble and amiable atmosphere in which to celebrate the Mass, including the Ordinariate Use of the Roman Rite.

The Ordinariate has captured my imagination. Ever since Pope Benedict’s expansion of the use of the Latin Mass in the 2007 Summorum Pontificum, and especially the constriction of it by Pope Francis in Traditionis Custodes of 2021, interest in the Latin Mass has blossomed. What is this rite by which nearly all our saints and ancestors were saved? What drove the process that changed it? Have we lost something we ought to preserve? 

More and more people want to find out for themselves, but the Latin Mass can be intimidating for those who came of age after the 1960s. It is different, and requires a bit of orientation and practice to feel confident in its celebration. 

The Ordinariate Rite is like a stepping stone to the Latin Mass. It is a beautiful liturgy with its own rich history, whose roots in the Catholic past have not been disturbed. I sometimes explain it to people as “the traditional Mass rendered in English.” The Fathers of the Pious House, who make their home at Veritatis, readily agreed to train and offer the Ordinariate. It is a new leaf in the folio of Catholic worship opportunities in east Texas.

Generically, “ordinariate” refers to an ecclesiastic organization led by someone other than the local bishop. When Anglicans began to embrace the Catholic Church in large numbers several decades ago, dialogue began between Pope Benedict and Anglican clergy. Whole Anglican congregations and dioceses wanted to become Catholic, without losing the rich patrimony of the Anglican church. They had preserved beautiful architecture, music and liturgy for their worship, and many could not bear that it be lost, to be replaced with stick-figure art, singsong music and modernistic architecture, the puerile aesthetic that had taken over many Catholic parish churches. 

Then Pope Benedict issued the exhortation Anglicanorum Coetibus in 2009, which allowed for the full communion of Anglicans with Rome, while retaining their own hymns, art and liturgy. These formerly-Anglican congregations were known as “ordinariates” and their liturgy, as the Ordinariate Use. 

The Anglican and Roman rites have a common ancestor, of course: the traditional Mass which was largely unchanged from the 3rd century until the 1960s. The Novus Ordo created some new things and jettisoned some old ones when it was promulgated in 1969, but of course, didn’t affect the Anglican Church at all. So the liturgy permitted to the Anglican Ordinariates, even after full communion with Rome, is essentially the Traditional Mass, rendered in English. 

The Mass schedule of the Holy Family Chapel gives us ample opportunity to explore our heritage in the Mass, both in Latin and in English. The Ordinariate is celebrated on Sundays at 8:30 am. Other Masses available during the week are Sundays at 10:30 am, Monday – Friday at 12:05 pm, and Saturdays at 9:00 am.

The drive from the Cathedral in downtown Tyler to the Veritatis chapel is 25 minutes into beautiful rolling hills and stands of pine. When you’re there for Mass, take a look around at the vision-becoming-reality of the Veritatis project. Remind yourself that, with perseverance and God’s grace, even dreams that people scoff at, that stumble on obstacles, that seem too good to be true, can indeed be realized, bringing something new and fresh into our lives.

Holy Family Chapel 

16711 County Road 356, Winona

The neighborhood at Veritatis Splendor is growing.

Tyler Diocesan Rosary Congress

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Ushering in the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
with the Pillars of Victory: The Holy Eucharist and The Holy Rosary!

At the Request of
Bishop Strickland,
the Diocese of Tyler
will pray for the
Church, our families,
and our nation
starting on October 1st.

The Rosary Congress is an intense week of prayer that hastens the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This truly spiritual experience is a foretaste of how beautiful the world will be when humanity returns to the love and service of God. It will be that period of peace foretold by Our Lady of Fatima wherein the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus will be the center of our lives and the Holy Spirit will fill our hearts with the fire of his love to renew the face of the earth. 

The Diocese of Tyler is one of many Diocese across the nation offering a week of 24 hours a day of prayer by hosting a Diocesan Rosary Congress (DRC). The DRC consists of Perpetual Adoration and Hourly Rosary offered in a spirit of reparation. The Rosary Congress will travel to 7 different parishes throughout the Diocese from October 1st through October 7th, 2022. Learn More Here

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Tyler will kick off the Diocesan Rosary Congress on Saturday, October 1st at the 8:30 am Mass

Sign up for a Holy Hour at the
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Tyler

Schedule:

Saturday, October 1st – Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception

  • 8:30am – Opening Holy Mass – Bishop Strickland
  • Followed by Eucharistic Procession – Bishop Strickland
  • Holy Rosary Chanted During Procession – Fr. Nick Napier
  • Followed by Consecration of Our Families to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – Bishop Strickland
  • Continual Adoration begins with the Holy Rosary said every hour – Laity
  • 1pm Blessed Sacrament Reposed for Wedding
  • 4pm Blessed Sacrament Exposed
  • 5:30pm Vigil Mass
  • 6:30pm Continual Adoration begins again with the Holy Rosary said every hour – Laity
  • Sunday, October 2nd, 6:00am Benediction – Bishop Strickland
  • 6:30am Closing Mass – Bishop Strickland

The DRC Continues to the Following Parishes:

  • Sunday, October 2nd – St Patrick’s, Lufkin
  • Monday, October 3rd – St Edward’s, Athens
  • Tuesday, October 4th – Sacred Heart, Mt Vernon
  • Wednesday, October 5th – St. Francis of the Tejas, Crokett
  • Thursday, October 6th – St Anthony, Longview
  • Friday, October 7th – Sacred Heart, Texarkana

Please join in this National endeavor to hasten
The Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary!

Sign up for a Holy Hour Here

For more information contact Celeste Spitz at (916) 923-8272 or email her at maryschildcvs@gmail.com

Let’s Pray for Bishop Joseph E. Strickland!

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Join us, the faithful sheepfold of the Diocese of Tyler, and become a Prayer Warrior for our Good Shepherd. Let’s unite to pray, from wherever you call home, in or outside the Diocese of Tyler, and show our love and support for his Excellency Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, Bishop for the World!

Beginning on Wednesday, September 7th & Ending on Thursday, September 15th
The Feast of our Lady of Sorrows

During the nine days of prayer, you are invited to make a Holy Hour for Bishop Strickland at the Chapel of Sts. Peter & Paul or wherever you can adore Jesus in the Eucharist. The intentions of Bishop Strickland’s Novena will be submitted at the tomb of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen at the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Concept ion in Peoria, Illinois.

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“Please assure all those who join in the Novena that I will offer Mass for them.”

~ Bishop Joseph Strickland

EFFICACIOUS NOVENA TO THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I. O my Jesus, you have said: “Truly I say to you,
ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find,
knock and it will be opened to you.”
Behold I knock, I seek and ask for the grace of…

 (Mention your intention here)

Our Father…Hail Mary…Glory be to the Father…

Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you.

II. O my Jesus, you have said: “Truly I say to you,
if you ask any thing of the Father in my name, He will give it to you.”
Behold, in your name, I ask the Father for the grace of…

(Mention your intention here)

Our Father…Hail Mary…Glory be to the Father…

Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you.

III. O my Jesus, you have said: “Truly I say to you,
heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away.”
Encouraged by your infallible words I now ask for the grace of…

 (Mention your intention here)

Our Father…Hail Mary…Glory be to the Father…

Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you.

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, for whom it is impossible not to have compassion on the afflicted,
have pity on us miserable sinners and grant us the grace which we ask of you,
through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, your tender mother and ours.

  • I PRAY for Bishop Strickland to receive all the graces needed to carry out the mission given to him by God the Almighty Father.
  • I PRAY for Bishop Strickland to be led by the Holy Spirit in all his daily actions carried out with Divine Wisdom as he guides his flock to eternal happiness in heaven.
  • I PRAY for Bishop Strickland to be continually protected by the intercession of Immaculate the Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus as he defends the True Catholic Faith and the Sanctity of Life.
  • I PRAY also for State Senator Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, who authored the Texas Heartbeat Law which was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Bless and protect him, his family and his good work for the sanctity of life and for the sovereignty of the states.
  • I PRAY also for the increase, within our Diocese, of priestly vocations and for all seminarians and religious.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, Have Mercy On Us!

What is CORAC?

Sheryl Collmer1 Comment

CORAC is the Corps of Renewal and Charity, created in 2020 to help people be ready for the storm we could see on the horizon. There are members across the United States, organized into geographical regions, so that everyone has a local group, as well as access to national expertise and support in communications, health and wellness, sustainable living, crisis scenarios and prayer.

The ethic of CORAC is simple: acknowledge God, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope to others. This credo has already gotten me through some hard times. It distills all the noise and fuss down to something anyone can do. 

For people who may be isolated in leftist parts of the country, CORAC provides a forum of like-minded people of faith, so that no one need feel alone in their convictions.

CORAC team leaders have spent over a year building an infrastructure so that in a crisis situation, we would have resources already at our fingertips, ready to deploy, as well as plans thought out in advance. For example, the crisis scenario team has protocols and checklists for a variety of possible emergencies posted on the website, and ready for each family to print out and have on-hand. That team also has a communication plan to deploy in case of emergency.   

One plan relies on a national network of HAM radio operators to get communications out to each member.  The hub is a mega station in the Dallas area, and that particular operator is networked into Bishop Strickland’s ham network for the Tyler diocese.

There are resources on the website for anyone who is not yet certified as a radio operator but wants to get equipped, as well as practice sessions for those who are just listeners on shortwave radio.

The health and wellness team consists of conventional physicians, homeopaths and herbalists. They review protocols for safety and accuracy, and publish those that deal with current health issues; for example, strategies to deal with vaccine injuries, ways to stay healthy through the cold & flu season, medicinal herbs that you can find almost anywhere. Much of what is on the website consists of solutions to problems we might encounter if conventional medicine was not available.

My sister in Kansas had a very bad case of covid last year, and could not get proper treatment in her little town, being unvaxxed. She finally called an MD in the nearest city, who was able to help her enormously. By sheer coincidence, that physician was a CORAC member. Now that doctor is my sister’s regular physician.

The national reach of CORAC has allowed members to find trustworthy doctors in other parts of the country for our family members who live far away. For example, one family here in Tyler had a relative in Illinois who was in serious trouble with covid. The hospital in that area would not treat him. I was able to call the regional coordinator for Illinois, and get a recommendation for a real doctor (one who cares more for the patient than the government) who prescribed the proper medications and got him on the road to recovery.

The sustainable living team deals with such things as farming and gardening, sanitation during emergencies, foraging, canning and preserving food. They do periodic Zoom classes that are recorded and then posted on the website, along with the notes in PDF form.

The prayer team has a national network of people who are actively praying for the monthly intentions of CORAC, as well as an ongoing Catechism class with Desmond Birch, one of the foremost eschatologists in the Church today.

The prayer team is also in charge of the network which will swing into action in a crisis, and match members who want to check on their out-of-state family members, to CORAC members in that area. This network is still being built, but I was able to access it in February when I had a friend who was terribly sick and stranded in Montana. He’d gone to two ERs for help, and neither one treated him. I called a CORAC member in Montana, who got prescriptions and food to him, as well as a priest who anointed him. (He’s fine now, thanks to that CORAC member.)

That’s the power of having a national infrastructure.

CORAC Geographical Regions

At the local level, it’s up to us to draw people in and build the supportive kind of community that will be like gold if there is a breakdown of any kind. This could look like foraging walks with a group, everyone identifying different plants and taking cuttings or samples. It could be a canning tutorial where all the participants bring fruit and learn how to preserve it safely. It could be a meeting of people bringing their shortwave radios to a central spot to practice tuning. It could be a workshop of emergency medicine, like bleeding control and triage techniques.

In a technology blackout or genuine emergency, we will all be hyper-focused at the local level, by necessity, so it’s important to build relationships and skills within the local groups. Access to national expertise may also be helpful for any knowledge gaps in the local groups.

There is a plan in every town where there is a CORAC member, to meet at the local parish church at 9:00 on the Saturday morning following any multi-day communications blackout. This is our strategy to share information, as well as to seek out those who may need special help.

There is no cost to join CORAC, and some materials on the website are only available to members. In addition, members receive a biweekly newsletter with news items, inspiration, tips for action, and links to helpful resources all around the internet.

So join me and help build a local network that will be charitable, helpful and resourceful in the event of a crisis. If a crisis never materializes (we wish), we will have built a strong community with valuable skills anyway!

Get Involved

Roe Ground Zero

Sheryl Collmer

Once upon a time, the world was safer for children. We played outside without adults, invented games, solved our own disputes and everyone got home in time for supper. Day or night, we knew that we could (and did) knock on literally any door in the neighborhood, and the adults there would help us without question. The whole culture looked out for children.

These days, if adults are looking out for children, it may very well be to exploit them, not protect them. If kids are even allowed to play outside, there are not multiple safe havens to run to; most households have no one at home. It’s a different universe for children now; they have no idea what true safety actually is. Roe changed everything in 1973. The world was already changing, and Roe sent it nuclear.

As we look with hope to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Mississippi, it’s important to listen to those who once knew a world in which children were indisputably valued under the law. Only 20% of the American public was born before January 23, 1973, and knows what a pre-Roe world looked like. We are like World War II veterans; soon our story will be buried with us. We have to tell it, and it begins in Dallas, where I grew up.

Roe v. Wade is a Texas tale. The case originated in Dallas with a Texas cast of characters: Henry Wade, the swashbuckling Dallas District Attorney; Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two University of Texas law graduates; Norma McCorvey (Roe), a pregnant Dallas waitress, who wandered into the story by chance.

I was 14 years old in 1973, a freshman in a nominally Catholic high school in Dallas, and mostly unaware of national political events when Roe was handed down. My older sister remembers very well reading the Tuesday headline, “ABORTION LEGAL” on the front page of the Dallas Morning News on that fateful January day. She understood what it meant deeply enough that she remembers crying over it.

Many years later, I found out that one of my best friends was among the first in line when clinics opened the moment the decision was handed down. The clinics had been set up well in advance, ready to service women the minute the decision was announced. They were dicey affairs in sketchy parts of town, and my friend remembers it only as “hideous.” She’s spent decades trying to erase the memory, but she does recall that all the girls lay together recovering in a big space where folding cots had been set up in close lines without privacy curtains.

It seemed that January 23 was a “tipping point,” everything already in place to make the decision inevitable. It’s like the tracks were greased.

Henry Wade, the losing name in the equation, was the Democrat District Attorney for Dallas County. Wade was a big Texas legend who cast a long shadow. He had an undefeated record for criminal prosecutions, including Jack Ruby’s conviction for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. He put on a Southern-fried Columbo act, catching legal opponents in his web like a cigar-chomping spider. He was formidable.

But he seemed to have cared little about Roe. He’d earned his reputation as a prosecutor of murderers, rapists, assassins, not as a defendant of a Texas law he didn’t really support. He entrusted the defense to two associates, not interested enough to participate. In later years, he never even read the decision.

When opposing attorney Sarah Weddington was informed that the case would be argued by someone other than Wade, she is said to have thanked her lucky stars. She was only 26 years old, and had never performed in a courtroom before. Had Wade given a damn about abortion, he probably would have buried Weddington in court, and children might still be safe in the United States. Or maybe not. In hindsight, the victory appears planned and coordinated. 

In the original Dallas case, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington allied to force the issue of “reproductive rights” in the courts. Coffee had already sketched out a test case when she asked Weddington to join her. The legal team complete, they went looking for a plaintiff to challenge the abortion prohibition in Dallas County.

In 1969, Norma McCorvey, an addicted nomad who’d worked in carnivals and restaurants, found herself pregnant with a third child and no support. Looking for an illegal abortion, she was introduced to Coffee by an associate who knew Coffee needed a plaintiff. Norma was already 5 months along, and desperate for help. She seemed unaware that the legal proceedings would not, in fact, help her at all, given that she had only four months to delivery. That may have been the beginning of what Norma would later characterize as “being used” by people for their own purposes.

Had Coffee and Weddington actually answered Norma’s request, they would have arranged for her to get an abortion in New York or California, but they needed her to be pregnant when the suit was filed, in order to have legal standing to sue. As the legal machine was just getting warmed up, Norma delivered her daughter, who was adopted by a north Texas family, all in God’s good plan.

Meanwhile, Norma became the name of the abortion culture after the Supreme Court decision in 1973, and was passed around the country on the speech circuit. Really, she had gotten sucked up by circumstances: she wanted to lose a child at the same time that Linda Coffee desperately needed a pregnant plaintiff. Had Coffee not been so anxious to bring the case, she might have waited for a more well-spoken, more well-turned out subject than Norma. Even after years on the public stage, Norma never developed into a polished speaker, and was never quite sure what people expected of her.

Despite the fierce face she learned to put on, Norma was a fragile personality inside a hard shell. In the mid-90s, her prickly heart was cracked open by the affection of a 4-year old child who greeted her in the mornings as she went into work at a Dallas abortion mill. The child belonged to a pro-life worker, praying and counseling on the sidewalk of the facility.

Norma began attending church with that family, and in 1995, was famously baptized in a swimming pool by Rev. Flip Benham of Operation Rescue.

Through friendships with many Catholics and Fr. Frank Pavone over the ensuing years, Norma began attending Mass at the Dominican Priory at the University of Dallas. She came under the direction of a holy priest, Fr. Edward Robinson, and was received quietly into the Catholic Church in 1998.

Norma regretted her cooperation with Coffee and Weddington terribly, calling it the biggest mistake of her life. In reparation, she founded the organization “Roe No More,” hoping she would live to see the day the carnage would end. She died in 2017.

And here we are, waiting expectantly for the Supreme Court to scrub her name from the pro-abortion movement. But can the world ever go back to the times when children were safe? Unfortunately, legal and widespread abortion has given rise to evil we couldn’t even have imagined in 1973. The hard-heartedness that grows in the aftermath of abortion has built up an army of irrational ragers against pre-born life, and against those who try to protect it. Over time, the movement has dispensed with niceties, and shown itself to simply be haters of goodness and of God.

It would be poetic for legal abortion to end in Dallas, where it began. And indeed, Dallas has built up a full-bodied pro-life organization with paid staff, hundreds of volunteers, and robust ministries for every phase of pregnancy and early parenthood. It’s been called the most effective diocesan pro-life organization in the world.

But it appears the honor of ending legal abortion will belong to Jackson, Mississippi, where the Jackson Women’s Health Organization of the case Dobbs v Jackson is still in business, pending the Supreme Court decision. A good synopsis of the case is here: https://www.ncregister.com/news/mississippi-pro-life-law-biggest-case-on-abortion-in-30-years.

Every pro-life organization and person in the country will need to step up if Roe is overturned by the Dobbs decision, as appears likely. It will take at least a generation for people to modify their behavior when abortion is less easily available. The children may be protected by law, but the task of reclaiming all the souls who have been coarsened by access to abortion will be epic. All hands will be needed.

Norma’s story should serve as encouragement. As a pro-abortion activist, she was none too pleasant, and I expect I would have recoiled from her anger the same way I recoil from the screeching rage that we see displayed now, across the country and even on our own small city square. But after everything she had done, and everything done to her, she retained enough of her true self to embrace Christ. I don’t think she ever fully healed from the damage she’d sustained, but Jesus and Mary brought her the rest of the way.

That’s a possibility for every person we encounter on the mined battlefields we will travel in this next era. Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t strike down Roe, notice has been served: the pro-abortion folks will never again take it for granted. The change is here, no matter what the Court does. And whether Miss Norma is in Purgatory or Heaven, she can pray for us. She can remind us that every angry woman can be saved.

May God strengthen us all to pave the way for goodness, after Roe is redeemed.

2000 Mules Waiting For Its Audience: Movie Review

Sheryl CollmerLeave a comment

The night after I saw “2000 Mules,” I didn’t sleep.

I went on Monday, May 2, opening night. I wanted to be part of the first wave if the film had the paradigm-shifting power I thought it might. I also prefer to see a movie before I read any reviews, so that I can experience my genuine reactions, free of any subconscious prejudices I may have picked up from others.

When I emerged from the theater, my mind was staggered with all the provocative issues the movie raised… and then, when I turned my phone back on, it was all blown up with messages about the Supreme Court leak. It really felt like the world had indeed shifted in the course of one evening, and that is not conducive to sleep.

Since Monday night, only one paradigm has taken over the national conversation, leaving “2000 Mules” in its dust. But like every other manufactured crisis (draft written months ago, final decision pending, the leak intentional and timed), the public’s attention will not stay focused for long. And when people realize that Roe is still not overturned, there will be “2000 Mules,” patiently waiting for you to notice.

For anyone who thinks that election fraud is not in the same universe of importance as Roe v Wade, I maintain that our best chance to restore a culture that values life is to have fair elections, in which decent people actually have a chance of being heard.

A week before the release of Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, an internet pundit predicted that soon, everyone would know what geo-fencing was. And if you see the film, you will want to know much more about the technology that True the Vote used to isolate the most egregious mules, in the most contested states, in arguably the most important US presidential election in history.

The term “mules” comes from drug cartel culture, where a mule is someone who illegally traffics substances for profit. The term was popularized by the 2018 Clint Eastwood movie, “The Mule,” in which the lead character begins to courier illegal drugs across the border to make enough money to save his broken existence. Votes are the drug in “2000 Mules,” and since it is incontrovertibly illegal to traffic ballots, the analogy holds.

Showing in an almost abandoned, echoingly empty mall, the theatre was packed. The only empty seats were in the neck-strain section of the very front row. The audience was like a noisy Pentecostal church congregation, shouting and cheers for the white hats, hissing and boos for the criminals. No one seemed to mind the noise.

As movies go, it was not great cinema. You could clearly see that Dinesh and Debbie were re-creating the setup scenes, like when they’re in their kitchen chatting and the phone chimes, and whaddaya know, it’s Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, calling to tell him that there are some things he’s going to want to see. Then you see Dinesh’s car pulling up to a mysterious warehouse-looking place for the Great Reveal. Yes, it’s a little hokey, but it was a humanizing device to add a bit of normalcy to a straight documentary format.

(It was especially amusing how Debbie could not stop smiling during the presentation of the evidence, which was as serious as myocarditis. She’s just so darn proud of her husband, she couldn’t keep it off her face.)

The inclusion of Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka, Charlie Kirk, Larry Elder and Eric Metaxas was another humanizing device. They were the Geiger counters. Dinesh solicited their opinions before and after they saw the evidence so you could see what effect it had. Before, several of them were unwilling to state categorically that the 2020 election was fraudulent, though they were suspicious. Afterward… well, you’ll see.

True the Vote is the real star of the movie, represented by founder Catherine Engelbrecht and data analyst Gregg Phillips. They say that the movie is just the beginning of a marathon effort and that they will not quit. Thank God for them! Gregg is the data specialist, and I would like to have heard much more from him, but the movie kept the premise simple enough to reach the majority.

Mules are identified as illegal couriers who picked up harvested ballots at central organizing points, and then visited multiple dropboxes to deliver them, often in the middle of the night. The team selected only those mules who visited at least 10 dropboxes and at least 5 non-profit organizations, where they presumably picked up batches of illegally obtained ballots.

The story of the electronic data used to identify these worst of offenders will surprise you. Did you know that vendors of phone apps collect your location data and sell it, through brokers, to anyone willing to pay? Analysts are able to build a “pattern of life” from the signals our cell phones emit. That explains why, when I get in my car, without ever opening an app, there is a notification with directions to my next destination. And it’s usually correct. It “knows” where I go on a regular basis.

In any case, True the Vote obtained two petabytes (a pedabyte is a million gigabytes) of data, ten trillion cell phone pings, and four million minutes of government surveillance video for their research. Curiously (wink) many of the cameras dedicated to surveilling the dropboxes had been disabled, but there’s plenty enough to carry the point. Video after video shows mules dropping off big handfuls of ballots. Anyone attempting to explain these videos away as rational behavior needs to answer the questions: who has access to so many ballots? who wears nitrile gloves to drop off ballots? who votes in the middle of the night? who takes photos of the ballots before dropping them in? who goes to dozens of different dropboxes on a Pac-man sort of a route through the city?

True the Vote only looked at certain counties within five swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Using the criteria of 10 dropboxes and 5 stash houses, they identified only the worse of the offenders. The fraud is potentially much, much bigger.

We learn that it is always and everywhere indisputably illegal to pay anyone for a ballot. Whistleblowers described how traffickers in nursing facilities appropriated or forged the ballots for people who were legally incompetent to vote. Did you know that a mail-in ballot probably went to your old addresses, as the Democrat party agitated for universal mail-in balloting in 2020? I had to wonder if COVID was created for just this purpose. Ballot harvesters target places like college dorms, apartment complexes and nursing facilities, places where people establish an address for only a short time. That leaves large numbers of ballots undeliverable to the proper person.

I guess I thought there was a mechanism in place to purge me from the voter rolls of my former addresses, but apparently not. This is a solid steel reason to go back to in-person voting. There could still be cheating, but it would be much more difficult.

One caveat to the overwhelming conclusion that Trump won the election is that legal proof was not shown that all the fraudulent ballots were marked for Biden. Anyone with a lick of sense knows they were, but it’s not provable by the movie. I would think that identification and investigation of the non-profit stash houses where the ballots were distributed to the mules would provide that evidence, but perhaps that is part of the marathon effort that True The Vote has pledged. 

“2000 Mules” presents the mere tip of the iceberg, and makes any thinking person want to know more about that electronic evidence. Then we all have the task of motivating law enforcement to take action on it.

The movie was set to detonate on Monday night, but suddenly, thanks to the Roe leak, no one was listening. Strange, that. But the evidence is there nevertheless. The criminals only got a reprieve, not a pardon. Go watch the movie and be a part of justice unfolding. 

Watch movie online as it goes public Friday, May 6, at 7:00 pm Eastern: https://2000mules.com/

Excellent textual background (in six parts): https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/2000-mules-exposing-the-ballot-traffickers?s=w

Catholic layman: Why I refuse to wear mask, provide contact details before entering church

Mary's Child CVSLeave a comment

To comply with these measures from the bishops would be to assent, by my conduct, to the false claim on which these measures are based

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/catholic-layman-why-i-refuse-to-wear-mask-provide-contact-details-before-entering-church

June 4, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – As Catholics, as Christians, and as people of good will (regardless of their faith or non-faith), we are all supposed to love truth. This includes not only theological truth, but scientific truth, medical truth, historical truth, and truth about matters of justice, laws, policies and politics. 

The response of Canada’s federal and provincial governments to COVID-19 appears to have been driven by Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, who predicted in March 2020 that as many as 510,000 people in the United Kingdom would die of COVID-19, along with 2,200,000 Americans. Once unleashed, this “Ferguson Fever” infected the minds of politicians around the globe, as well as the media and the public at large. 

In the name of “saving lives,” politicians have shut down schools, universities, businesses, gyms, recreation and entertainment facilities of every kind, restaurants, bars, pubs, cafes, libraries, mosques, temples, synagogues, churches, and much of the economy. All of this to make room for the wave of COVID-19 patients who would soon overwhelm our hospitals, needing thousands of ventilators and Intensive Care Units. With very few exceptions, politicians have made no effort to calculate, or even to attempt to calculate, the numerous harms and the predictable suffering which these lockdown measures would inflict, and indeed have inflicted, on so many people.

What we now know in June, and sadly did not know in March, is that the global COVID-19 death toll (374,000 as of June 1) is within the range of deaths resulting from the annual flu. The annual flu tragically claims between 290,000 and 646,000 lives each year, most of them people who are elderly and already very sick. We also know now that COVID-19 poses little if any threat to children and healthy adults. Yet Dr. Ferguson’s wildly inaccurate predictions are still used by fearmongering politicians to frighten Canadians into accepting the continued violation of their Charter freedoms to move, travel, associate, assemble and worship.

Government measures which continue to violate our human dignity and our fundamental Charter freedoms could arguably have been justified in March, and imposed temporarily, at a time when we did not know what we know now.  But in June, we know that 95% of COVID-19 deaths occur amongst those 60 and older, with more than two-thirds of COVID-19 deaths in people 80 and over, and next-to-zero deaths among people under 20. COVID-19 tragically targets the same demographics as the annual flu. This is what publicly available government data is telling us, from provinces, states, and countries around the world.

Sadly, it seems the Catholic bishops of Alberta have accepted the Ferguson-like predictions of Premier Jason Kenney, who claimed in early April that as many as 32,000 Albertans could die of COVID-19. At the end of May, COVID-19 had claimed the lives of 143 Albertans, not 32,000. Putting aside conjecture, hypothesis and speculation, there is no actual evidence that the number of COVID-19 deaths would have been higher without a lockdown.  

Premier Kenney has repeatedly compared COVID-19 to the Spanish Flu of one hundred years ago, which killed between 20 and 100 million adults, most aged 20-40, at a time when the world’s population was only two billion. Globally, the 374,000 COVID-19 deaths (as of June 1, 2020) constitute 0.00005 of the world’s population: one half of one percent of one percent. This means the Spanish Flu was between 200 and 1,000 times more deadly than COVID-19. Any comparison of the two is ignorance of fact, or deliberate fearmongering.

Relying on the inaccurate and fear-inducing predictions of March rather than on the facts that have been readily available since early May, Alberta’s Catholic bishops are asking their flock to behave as though COVID-19 is a very serious threat to everyone, regardless of age or health. 

Rather than quelling unfounded fears, Alberta’s bishops, touting “safety,” now require Mass attendees to wear masks; to subject themselves to personal health questions before being allowed to enter the church; and to provide their names, addresses and phone numbers to be written on a sheet and made available to the government upon request.

While Alberta’s more than 11,000 restaurants can seat six people from six different households at the same table, only a foot or two apart from each other, the bishops insist that Catholics at mass must maintain “social distancing” of six feet or two metres, unless they are from the same household. While restaurants can operate at 50% capacity, such that a large restaurant can welcome 100 or 200 people at the same time, the bishops insist that no more than 50 people be permitted inside a church, even a large Cathedral that can seat over 1,000 people. 

While the Alberta government has re-opened daycares and day camps, the bishops insist that infants and children at Mass must remain with their parents or guardians at all times, in spite of the fact that COVID-19 is less likely to kill children than a lightning strike. 

Restaurant patrons are treated like adults, free to shake or not shake the hand of another person, but the bishops prohibit Catholics from shaking hands before, during and after Mass. Albertans are now free to socialize at bars, pubs, restaurants and cafes, but the bishops insist that Catholics cannot socialize with each other before or after Mass.

Tim Hortons, McDonald’s, and many other drive-throughs serve hundreds of thousands of Albertans every week, yet the bishops prohibit the faithful from receiving Holy Communion on the tongue “in view of the common good.” The bishops’ requirements pre-suppose that the wildly inaccurate predictions made by Dr. Neil Ferguson and Premier Kenney are correct, that COVID-19 kills people as the Spanish Flu did, and that everyone should be very, very worried. The bishops seem to have forgotten that the common good must be based on truth, not on fearmongering predictions that were discredited many weeks ago.

The bishops have also banned congregational singing as a “high-risk activity”; the presentation of the gifts; and our entrance and recessional processions. The bishops have banned summer camps for Catholic children and families, which is entirely unnecessary. 

Since the lockdown in March, Premier Kenney has deemed box stores, hardware stores, abortion clinics and liquor and marijuana outlets as “essential.” By failing to insist to government that churches are more essential than gyms and health clubs, the bishops have effectively taught that, while Tim Horton’s coffee may be essential, the Holy Mass is not.

Perhaps the average Catholic cannot be faulted for failing to spend a few minutes to get acquainted with readily-available government data that suggests that COVID-19 is not more deadly than the annual flu and targets the same demographic as the annual flu. Perhaps the average Catholic can be forgiven for remaining fearful when Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw made a demonstrably false claim when stating, in regard to COVID-19, that “some people who are young and healthy will go on to have severe disease and die.”

In contrast to the laity, bishops have a higher duty: to acquaint themselves with the facts that were already available in early May. When politicians impose measures which very obviously violate the freedom of Catholics to practice their faith, Catholic bishops have a duty to look at the facts, rather than permit themselves to be led about by dubious political claims. 

In the past 2,000 years, whenever Caesar demanded that Christian worship be curtailed, appropriate disagreement with Caesar has been a vital part of our Christian tradition, from which we should draw wisdom and courage. Bishops should be guided by love that is rooted in truth, rather than encouraging Catholics to live in daily fear.

Attendance at Mass is currently not obligatory. Why then do we need all these prohibitions and restrictions, which are not enforced on other public places? Those who attend Mass in person, instead of virtually, assess the risks and choose to attend, just as people decide to enter a grocery store or a restaurant rather than ordering online. Why not hold separate Masses, with a myriad of precautions, for the truly vulnerable?

My objection to the Alberta bishops’ new requirements (even if the requirements are supposed to be temporary) is that they are based entirely on the acceptance of the government’s demonstrably false claim that COVID-19 is an exceptionally deadly killer that threatens everyone. 

For me to comply with these measures would be to assent, by my conduct, to the false claim on which these measures are based. As someone who is called to love the truth, and to bear witness to the truth, I will not do so.

The True Church

Mary's Child CVSLeave a comment

This article is written by a young, passionate theologian. You may or may not agree but please read all the way through before you decide.

I do not know about you, but these past two months have felt like an eternity. Time has taken on a new dimensionality that I did not know was possible. I used to always lament that time was flying and that the weeks, months, and years were disappearing before my eyes. Now it is the exact opposite, time has slowed down to a crawl. When I reflect to March of this year, it seems like it was forever ago and a million things have happened since then, and at the same time, nothing has happened! It truly is a weird paradoxical feeling that has been created with this whole Corona virus scam that has captured the world.

The Spirit of the Anti-Christ is now working overtime to accomplish his evil plans. This is why we are seeing the leaders and “experts” of our time sowing so much confusion and disorientation into the world. The number one thing I keep hearing from people in conversation is that “none of this makes any sense.” And they are correct. It does not make sense. But this is by design. The confusion surrounding everything is what keeps people in fear and ultimately in control. We must try and see through the thick fog that has enveloped the world and clouded the minds of millions. The light of Christ is truly the only way that we will have any understanding and clarity in these dark and diabolical times. 

“The God who rules this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers. They cannot see the light, which is the good news about our glorious Christ, who shows what God is like” (2 Corinthians 4: 4-5). For those with the eyes to see, the scamdemic plot to overtake the minds and hearts of the world is as plain as day. These people do not wear masks, they do not believe in or promote the new terms that have been created out of thin air and repeatedly pounded into our heads (social distancing, quarantining the healthy, flattening the curve, etc.) The children of light must reject all this evil and do so publicly. Christ is King and we belong to him. Our lives must reflect this truth and our actions and words make this a reality.

Depending on how much you have been paying attention to the situation in the Church, this either comes as a complete shock to you, or it does not.  The Church as an institution has been completely infiltrated by Satan and the errors that have spewed forth from its clergy have infected the minds and souls of millions of Catholics worldwide for decades. To some extent, this threat was always present in the Church from its inception, but in our times, it has hit a critical mass. It is hard for many of us who have only known one version of the Catholic Church, the Church that began after Vatican II. This version of the Catholic Church, that preached Ecumenism and tolerance of all the world’s false religions, weakened the Catholic Church to such a degree that the majority of “Catholics” today do not believe in anything that even remotely resembles the true Faith that Christ handed to his Apostles.

The lack of familiarity with the early Church and what it went through to survive is another major issue. I believe the answers to today’s problems are found best by looking back to the early Church to see exactly how they would have attempted to preserve the Faith against all the odds. These early Christians paid for their Faith with their blood. We celebrate these martyrs in the Church, but we have removed ourselves from them in how we believe. This is best evidenced by the fact that the hierarchy in the Church has allowed the complete and total shut down of the masses worldwide. This is the victory of the spirit of the Anti-Christ.

The true Church has now returned to its early form. It has moved underground out of necessity. There are priests now risking their ecclesial livelihood and ostracization from the hierarchy for bringing the people the Sacraments.  The step of laying down one’s life for the flock for these true shepherds cannot be far off. You should seek out one of these true shepherds and pray you can find them in these times.  Stay constantly near to them because they are the ones who have the power to bring heaven to earth and bring you the living Word in the flesh.  If not, do not fear, for Christ has overcome the world and he will reward those whose faith has not been disturbed by these evil events. Things will continue to get much worse before they get better but that only means the opportunity for greater Saints to be raised up in these last days is available to us. Let us purify ourselves daily in our renewed commitment to follow Christ all the way to the cross, knowing full well the cost.

Catacombs of the Early Christians

Written by JB of the Remnant