Maledicta terra in opere tuo:
in laboribus comedes ex ea cunctis diebus vitæ tuæ.
Spinas et tribulos germinabit tibi, et comedes herbam terræ.
In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane,
donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es:
quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

Cursed be the ground because of you!
In toil you will eat from it all the days of your life.
Thorns and thistles it will produce for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread,
until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Gen 3:17-19

THE beginning of the sacred season of Lent, which the Holy Church inaugurates with the austerity of her ceremonies and vestments on this Ash Wednesday, was in ancient times marked not only by the practice of fasting and penance for all the faithful, but also by the solemn rite of expulsion of public penitents until Holy Thursday. Sinners guilty of particularly grave crimes were summoned to the Cathedral before the beginning of the Pontifical Mass to present themselves, barefoot and dressed in sackcloth, to the Bishop. In the presence of all the people, the Penitentiary would announce the sins of each penitent and impose ashes on them, saying: Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris: age pænitentiam, ut habeas vitam æternam. A Canon sprinkled them with holy water and the Bishop blessed their penitential vestments – that is, their sackcloth – and all the clergy recited the seven penitential Psalms and the Litanies. Finally, after four prayers, the Bishop gave a homily, ostendens qualiter Adam propter peccatum eiectus est de paradiso, et multa maledicta in eum congesta sunt; et qualiter eius exemplo ipsi de Ecclesia ad tempus eijciendi sunt – showing how Adam, because of his sin, was expelled from paradise and many curses were poured upon him; and how, following his example, they too [the penitents] must be temporarily expelled from the Church. At this point, the Bishop took one of the penitents by the hand, forming a chain out of of all those who were expelled from the church. And showing his own emotion, cum lacrymis, he said: Ecce eijcimini vos hodie a liminibus sanctæ matris Ecclesiæ propter peccata vestra, et scelera vestra, sicut Adam primus homo ejectus est de paradiso propter transgressionem suam – Behold, today you are expelled from the confines of Holy Mother Church because of your sins and wickedness, just as Adam, the first man, was expelled from paradise because of his transgression. Meanwhile, the choir sang an antiphon that recalled the words of the Book of Genesis (Gen 3:16-19). To the penitents who remained kneeling and weeping before the Cathedral portal, the Bishop urged them not to despair of the Lord’s mercy, but rather to dedicate themselves to fasting, prayer, pilgrimages, almsgiving, and good works. Finally, he invited them to return no earlier than the morning of Holy Thursday. The church doors were then closed before Mass began.

This solemn and austere rite remained in perpetual memory in the Roman Pontifical until the last reform in 1962, only to be eliminated—and not by chance—by the so-called “conciliar reform.” We understand well why a church that seeks to engage in “dialogue” with the world, and which therefore opens its doors, tears down its walls, and lowers its drawbridges, would not retain such a ceremony that was highly symbolic and certainly pedagogical. Behind the specious intention of welcoming all (“todos, todos, todos”)—an inclusiveness that has nothing Catholic about it—lies the cancellation of original sin, and with it the need for the Redemption accomplished by the Incarnate Word and responded to by the faithful through penance, fasting, and prayer. According to this anthropocentric vision—clearly heretical—supposedly we are all saved, we have never sinned, neither in Adam nor personally, and God just forgives everyone, indeed He supposedly loves us just as we are and does not ask us to change, much less repent or make amends for our sins. Therefore, the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity would be useless; His Passion and Death would be useless; the Church, the Mass, the Sacraments, and the Priesthood would be useless.

The conciliar and synodal Church repeats to us: Eritis sicut dii – you will be like gods (Gn 3:5), because you have no need to atone for anything, no need to ask forgiveness for anything, and no need to be grateful for anything, either to God or to the Holy Church for her work of sanctification. The conciliar and synodal Church goes so far as to theorize, with syncretistic ecumenism, that even by worshiping a false divinity or denying, in whole or in part, the truths of Divine Revelation, man can be saved and go to heaven. The only ones who significantly deserve eternal punishment and the rigors of divine justice are supposedly those who—in the face of such apostasy—continue to believe what the Catholic Church has always taught. Canon law, which is considered intolerant and obsolete for everyone else, is applied severely to them.

Holy Roman Church, who is a Mother and not a stepmother, operates according to pedagogical criteria that have proven widely effective. And just as a wise mother deprives her disobedient son of the gifts she has freely given him, so that he may understand his fault and correct himself, so the Church, following God’s example with Adam and Eve, knew how to punish public sinners by temporarily expelling them from public celebrations, of which they had rendered themselves unworthy before the community of the faithful. Not in order to abandon them to their own devices on the path to perdition, but precisely so that this deprivation of tangible and external comfort would persuade them to understand the gravity of their sins and to make amends for them with prayer, fasting, penance, almsgiving, and good works. The faithful prayed for them, mindful of that Communion of Saints that unites in mutual charity the members of the Mystical Body to its Head. Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord!” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Mt 7:21). Doing the Father’s will is in fact what makes us worthy of blessed eternity after the trial of this earthly life: Your kingdom come; Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Mt 6:10).

The solemn and evocative Lenten rite of the expulsion of public penitents recalls the expulsion of our first parents from the earthly Paradise, and is therefore extremely eloquent and symbolic. It reminds us that violating God’s Law carries a punishment commensurate with its gravity, but at the same time shows us how Divine Justice is tempered by Divine Mercy. The announcement of the Protoevangelium in the Book of Genesis even precedes the Lord’s curse: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15). We will find this Woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars, in the book of Revelation (Rev 12:1), in fulfillment of the promise of the Holy Trinity. The deprivation of the earthly Paradise—the penalty for the conscious and wretched disobedience of Adam and Eve, who were already, in some way, like gods thanks to God’s gifts—does not preclude them or their descendants from returning to the Father’s House. The condition for this return, however, is linked to their willingness to make amends for the sin committed, to the humility of acknowledging themselves as sinners and in need of forgiveness. And this is possible not through their own merits, which are obviously powerless before the enormity of their guilt, but by uniting their repentance to the divine work of Redemption, accomplished by the New Adam, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with the cooperation of the New Eve, Mary Most Holy, that is, the Ever-Virgin Immaculate Mother, and her lineage.

In the contemporary world—particularly since Vatican II—those who once would have been considered public sinners are now welcomed and encouraged in their deviations, even by popes, by prelates and members of the clergy who are most unworthy, whose sins are equally public and scandalous to the faithful, who in turn are led into sin. But it is precisely this that constitutes the ultimate offense to the Divine Majesty: not so much and not only the evil committed, but rather its denial, indeed its legitimization, and at the same time the condemnation of the good that opposes it.

For this reason, dear faithful, the earth is still cursed today; nor could it be otherwise. The horrors and heinous crimes brought to light in recent days with the publication of Jeffrey Epstein’s files cry out to Heaven for vengeance, all the more so because of the silence surrounding them and the impunity ostentatiously granted to the guilty. Our skies are sprayed with poisons that spill over into crops and aquifers; carcinogenic substances in food; the destruction of crops and livestock for the benefit of multinational corporations’ intensive production; diseases caused by deliberately harmful and sterilizing pseudo-drugs; the imposition of “sacrifices” and “penances” for the so-called protection of our “common home”; the minute control of our every action, no longer under the gaze of God but under the eye of surveillance cameras: all these outrages, the infernal parody with which an elite, intoxicated with power and literally thirsty for human blood, seeks to replace God in legislating, in deciding what is good and what is evil, in declaring its “saints” and its “damned,” in promulgating its “rites” and its “excommunications.” This elite also has its “public penitents,” who are ostracized by the system until they convert to the infernal ideology of globalism.

Let us return to the Lord, dear faithful. Let us return to Him in sackcloth and ashes, and may the Church return along with us to condemn sin and encourage virtue, without pretense or hypocrisy, without compromise, without culpable indulgences that offend Divine Justice and nullify Divine Mercy. This is the meaning of the prayer the Bishop used to recite before the penitents dressed in sackcloth: Dómine Deus noster, qui offensiónem nostram non vínceris, sed satisfactióne placáris; réspice, quæsumus, ad hos fámulos tuos, qui se tibi peccásse gráviter confiténtur; tuum est enim absolutiónem críminum dare, et véniam præstáre peccántibus, qui dixísti te pœniténtiam malle peccatórum quam mortem: concéde ergo, Dómine, ut tibi pœniténtiæ excúbias célebrent, et corréctis áctibus suis conférri sibi a te sempitérna gáudia gratuléntur – Lord our God, you who are not overcome by our offenses, but are appeased by penitential satisfaction, look, we beseech you, upon these your servants, who confess that they have gravely sinned against you. For it is yours to grant absolution from crimes and to grant pardon to sinners, you who have said that you prefer the sinner’s penance to his death. Grant, then, O Lord, that they may keep vigils of penance for you and, by the correction of their deeds, rejoice in receiving from you eternal joys. And so may it be.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

February 18, MMXXVI
Feria IV Cinerum