Letter from the Pastor: October 2021

Dear Faithful,

Every October, leading up to the great feast of Christ the King, we celebrate two very loud historical statement moments from the Blessed Virgin: the Battle of Lepanto on October 7 and the Miracle at Fatima on October 13. This year’s feast of the Holy Rosary is especially notable, as it marks 450 years since the Christian forces held back the Muslim onslaught at Lepanto.

As Our Lady predicted at Fatima, Russia’s errors have spread throughout the world and now infected our own beloved country. The answer today, as she said then, is the same as it was for the Christian world on October 7, 1571: the Rosary. Our fighting spirit today will have to be built upon the unassailable fortress that is the rock of faith.

Therefore, I strongly encourage all of you to pray the 15-decade Rosary in your homes on October 7 and 13.

(If you would like to learn more about the Battle of Lepanto, this conference is excellent.)

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Before I leave you with some quotes for reflection on related matters, please consider participating in the following two events:

• October 4: Latin Responses Webinar begins. This is mandatory for all servers, i.e. boys from 1st Communion, but open to all. Information can be found here, but registration and discounted payment can be made here.
• October 11: Columbus Day parade in Cleveland’s Little  Italy — come join our students in the parade! We will line up at the corner of Murray Hill Rd. & Cornell Rd. As the leftists seeks to eradicate every single vestige of Christian influence, events like this take on a renewed importance, no doubt!

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From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West:

• The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
• In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
• Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending on circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends on class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea.
• All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
• And we, from the whole of our life experience there, have concluded that there is only one way to withstand violence: with firmness.
• The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.

From Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West:

• Americans who look on this cultural revolution as politics-as-usual do not understand it. It means to make an end of the country we love. It cannot be appeased. Its relentless, reckless use of terms like extremist, sexist, racist, homophobe, nativist, xenophobe, fascist, and Nazi testifies to how seriously it takes the struggle and how it views those who resist. To true believers in the revolution, the Right is not just wrong; the Right is evil.
• We are two countries, two peoples. An older America is passing away, and a new America is coming into its own. The new Americans who grew up in the 1960s and the years since did not like the old America. They thought it a bigoted, reactionary, repressive, stodgy country. So they kicked the dust from their heels and set out to build a new America, and they have succeeded. To its acolytes the cultural revolution has been a glorious revolution. But to millions, they have replaced the good country we grew up in with a cultural wasteland and a moral sewer that are not worth living in and not worth fighting for—their country, not ours.
• Is the death of a religious-based culture inevitable once a society reaches general affluence? When a nation has overcome the hardships of its infancy and the struggles of its adolescence and manhood, and begins to produce a life of ease and luxury, does it naturally succumb to a disease of the soul that leads to decadence, decline, and death? “America is the only country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between,” said Oscar Wilde. Did the man have a point?

God bless,
Fr. Deister