Sermon Given by Fr. De Pauw October 13, 1990

It was May 13th, 1917, that the greatest of the apparitions of Fatima took place. But it was on October 13th, that the mother of God told the world these words:

A great tragedy shall fall upon all mankind in the second half of the 20th century. The Church will fall into darkness and the entire world plunged into confusion.

This prediction made at Fatima 100 years ago by the Blessed Mother has come true. Indeed the Church has fallen into darkness for 2 simple reasons.

The darkness fell upon our Church when the spiritual sources of light disappeared from our Church. Those two sources of spiritual light are the Mass and the priesthood.

With the Mass gone, except in this chapel and a few other places where some real priests had the courage, albeit it too late, but better late then never, the Church was bound to go, as St. John Cardinal Newman put it "tolle missam, tolle ecclesiam ... do away with the Mass and you will do away with the Church."

It was a total break with the Church of the past when the true Mass was replaced with the Novus Ordo liturgy which the late cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci publicly rejected as not Catholic at all. And it was when the true Mass was replaced by that Novus Ordo liturgy; it was then that everything else our Church establishment may attempt to do, was doomed to failure because from that day on, the curse of St. Pius V rests upon everything our Church leaders do. The curse that

St. Pius V put upon all of them in his decree Quo Primum of 1570, to anyone who would ever dare to touch as much as one word in that old traditional Latin Mass and if they would dare to do so " let them know that they have incurred the curse of Almighty God and of the blessed apostles of Peter and Paul.

The priesthood disappeared with it. It was one of the greatest spiritual writers of the Church in the 17th century, St. John Hudes, who wrote in his book: "the most evident sign of God's anger and the most terrible punishment God can inflict upon the world is when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clergy who are priests more in name then in deed, priests who are no longer shepherds but wolves, priests who have abandoned the things of God to serve their worldly ambitions”.