FOR ETERNAL ROME

“…Let the Priest capable of preaching go to the limits of his power to preach, to absolve sins, and to celebrate the True Mass. Let the Sister teacher go to the limits of her grace and power to form girls in the Faith, good morals, purity, and literature. Let every Priest and layman, every small group of laymen and Priests who have authority and power over a small stronghold of the Church and Christianity, go to the limits of their possibilities and powers. Let the leaders and pupils of such strongholds know each other and be in contact with each other. Let each stronghold, protected, defended, trained, and directed in its prayers and songs by a royal authority, become as much as possible a fortress of holiness. This is what will guarantee the continuation of the True Church and effectively prepare for its renewal when it is God's good time.

“Thus, we must not be afraid, but pray with all confidence and exercise without fear, according to the  Tradition and, in the sphere that corresponds to us, the power we have, thus preparing us for the happy time when Rome will once again be Rome (the eternal Rome) and the Bishops will be Bishops (acting as genuinely Catholic Bishops).

Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel. Brief Apology for the Church of Always.

THE RIGHT TO DIE OR THE DEATH OF LAW

By Óscar Méndez Oceguera

The New Laboratory of Legalized Death

On October 10, 2025, Uruguay became the first country in Latin America to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide. With a narrow majority, the Senate approved the law allowing physicians to provoke or facilitate the death of anyone suffering from “unbearable pain” or “incurable disease.”

The press hailed it as a historic milestone, a moral advance, a step forward for freedom. Official speeches repeated the modern catechism: autonomy, dignity, compassion.

But behind those words hides a substitution far deeper than a law: the replacement of natural order by will, of being by desire. A statute has been enacted that destroys the very foundation of Law itself, for it turns into an object of disposal that which constitutes its principle. Life—the source of all rights—has become a matter of contract.

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A Carefully Rehearsed Global Sequence

The Uruguayan gesture is not isolated. It forms part of a carefully rehearsed sequence in Europe and North America: it begins by invoking pity for the terminally ill and ends by justifying the elimination of those who “can no longer enjoy life.”

The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Portugal—all followed the same itinerary, with identical emotional language and increasingly radical results.

In every case, the promise of a humanitarian exception for terminal patients transformed—by an unstoppable logic and progressive reinterpretation—into a system of legally administered elimination that now extends to those with mental disorders or who are simply “tired of living.”

Death ceased to be a limit and became a public service, ever more inclusive.

And now Latin America begins to replicate this architecture. In Mexico, the so-called Ley Trasciende copies almost word for word the Uruguayan arguments: “freedom to choose,” “dignified death,” “medical compassion.” None of these formulas aim to strengthen palliative care or spiritual accompaniment: all are directed toward institutionalizing the power to suppress life in the name of autonomy.

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Freedom Confused with Dominion

The first confusion of our age is to believe that freedom means dominion. Modern man, obsessed with being master of himself, has forgotten that freedom does not consist in being able to do anything, but in being able to do good.

It is not ownership, but participation.

Freedom without truth does not liberate—it dissolves. And when the will ceases to recognize itself as subordinate to the good, it becomes power without measure. The will that kills is no longer free: it is enslaved to fear, pain, or weariness.

There is, therefore, no act more self-contradictory than assisted suicide: it is the negation of freedom in the name of freedom itself.

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The Metaphysical Error of Owning One’s Being

The error stems from a metaphysical root: the idea that man possesses his being (his substance) as he possesses his goods (his accidents).

But no one can own what constitutes him. I do not have my life as I have my belongings: I am my life—my esse.

And what I am, I cannot lawfully destroy.

Man’s relationship to his existence is not one of dominion but of ontological stewardship. To dispose of life is not to exercise a right, but to betray it.

Life does not belong to the individual; it has been entrusted to him. It is not a matter of sovereignty, but of responsibility.

Whoever turns life into property plants the seed of juridical nihilism: if everything I possess I may destroy, then everything that exists may be eliminated.

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The Law That Ceases to Be Law

From this confusion flows the collapse of Law.

For law, if it is to be just, must be founded on the good and not on will. Life is the first good—the presupposition of all norms. Without it, no justice is possible.

Therefore, a law that authorizes the suppression of life is not law but the fiction of legality. It replaces order with procedure, truth with majority.

It is the perfect form of disorder: a system that legislates against its own principle.

What was once called homicide is now called a right; what was once called pity is now called compassionate elimination.

Thus Law dies—not when injustices are committed, but when they are codified.

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Falsified Dignity

Euthanasia’s defenders invoke dignity, but confuse it with comfort.

They believe that a weak or suffering body ceases to be dignified, as if dignity depended on vigor or usefulness.

Yet human dignity is neither gained nor lost—it is inherent to being.

Illness does not degrade it; it reveals it. In fragility shines forth the greatness of what we are: rational creatures, dependent and open to love.

True indignity does not lie in suffering, but in being abandoned.

Hence the law that offers death instead of accompaniment is not compassion but social fatigue—the organized renunciation of a society that no longer endures vulnerability and prefers to conceal it under the name of freedom.

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Betrayed Compassion

Nor is there compassion in killing to avoid pain.

True compassion does not eliminate the sufferer—it accompanies him, embraces him, sustains him, elevates him.

Modern compassion, by contrast, is desperate sentimentalism: unable to give meaning to pain, it erases the sufferer.

The physician ceases to heal and becomes an administrator of despair.

The hospital ceases to be a house of relief and becomes an office for euthanasia.

What is presented as an act of mercy is, in truth, the coldest form of abandonment.

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The Medicine of the Soul: Palliative Care

While laws of death are passed, palliative care—the true human response to suffering—remains scarce and neglected.

Wherever it is practiced, the request to die virtually disappears, for the patient who feels accompanied no longer wishes to die: he wishes to live well.

The sick do not ask for death; they ask not to be alone.

Thus, legislating euthanasia without ensuring palliative care is not compassion but institutional negligence.

It offers a syringe instead of a hand.

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Suffering as Revelation of Being

Suffering, far from being an error to be excised, is the place where man encounters his limit and his soul.

Pain reveals the truth of being—its dependence, its fragility, its openness to the other.

At that edge where finitude is touched, man learns humility and gratitude.

Where the body breaks, the spirit may grow.

Hence cultures that knew how to accompany pain were more human than those that eliminate it.

Ours, instead, has made comfort its only value and thus deems useless all that does not produce pleasure.

From this arises the monstrous notion of disposable humans: lives deemed meaningless once they lose functionality.

The elderly who feel burdensome, the sick who fear impoverishing their families, the poor who do not wish to weigh on the State—all are gently, bureaucratically pushed to disappear.

The society of comfort has turned death into an act of efficiency.

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The Denial of Purpose and the Corruption of Justice

The ultimate root of this phenomenon is the denial of finality.

When the notion of natural end is lost, everything is reduced to technique.

Pain ceases to have meaning; death ceases to be a passage; life ceases to be a mission.

Man, reduced to producer and consumer, is measured by utility, not by being.

But Law cannot survive such logic: if it recognizes no intrinsic ends, it merely regulates appetites.

And where law becomes the servant of desire, justice perishes.

Euthanasia, in its apparent neutrality, enshrines this final nihilism: the belief that man has no destiny higher than his own consent.

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The Neutral State That Decides Who Dies

The State, whose duty is to protect life, disguises itself as neutral and ends up arbitrating who may die.

In the name of autonomy, it administers self-negation.

It is the same principle that permitted abortion and now prepares genetic engineering: the claim to possess the body as a thing.

But the body is not an object—it is the form of the soul.

We do not have bodies; we are bodies.

To treat the body as property is to confuse the person with matter and to open the door to total manipulation.

From there to sanitary totalitarianism is but one step: the power to decide who should live for reasons of utility, cost, or convenience.

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The Law That Dies of Self-Negation

Law, reduced to the will of majorities, ceases to be rational.

A statute that legitimizes assisted suicide turns the State into an accomplice of nihilism.

And a society that calls the destruction of its vital principle a right prepares itself to vanish as a civilization.

For Law dies not when it is violated, but when it is denatured.

Its essence lies not in consensus, but in truth.

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The Purifying Meaning of Limit

Suffering, on the other hand, holds a meaning that transcends all human law.

He who endures it with love discovers the greatness that pleasure never teaches.

He who accompanies the dying learns more about life than he who flees from pain.

He who bears his limit with hope purifies his soul and prepares it for eternity.

In that silent school are forged the virtues that sustain the world: patience, compassion, humility, faith.

To suppress that experience is to erase humanity’s moral apprenticeship.

Euthanasia, more than a medical act, is an amputation of the spirit.

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Barbarism with a Clinical Face

No civilization is possible if man does not accept that life possesses a meaning greater than himself.

He who destroys the limit destroys measure; he who eliminates pain eliminates conscience; he who turns law into an instrument of death signs the death certificate of justice.

The only modernity worthy of the name is not the one that hastens death but the one that teaches how to die humanely.

To legislate the elimination of the weak is not progress: it is barbarism with a clinical face.

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The Final Decision

Life, even in suffering, remains a good.

The law that denies it does not liberate but enslaves; it does not console but abandons; it does not protect but destroys.

When a civilization turns death into a right, it abdicates both its reason and its soul.

For Law lives only while the conviction endures that life deserves defense for its own sake.

When that conviction dies, what remains is not freedom but moral desert.

Upon that choice depends everything we understand by humanity.

A society is defined not by how it treats its strongest, but by how it kills its weakest—even when it does so in the name of freedom.

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In this impasse are at stake Law itself, respect for nature, and even the soul.

Most Holy Virgin, SAVE US!

 

IMPOSSIBLE DIALOGUE BETWEEN LOST SANITY AND THE 21st CENTURY

(Recreation of G. K. Chesterton’s testament to the modern world)

Scene:

London, the year 2025. A library that is both museum and airport terminal: marble, glass, screens, saints in oil paintings, and a clock that runs fast so no one arrives on time. The scent of pipe smoke—ancient, cordial—appears ownerless. The shadow of an immense man sits down, as if that chair had always been reserved for him.

L.M. —Mr. Chesterton, have you returned to judge us or to laugh with us?

G.K.C. —For both, which are usually the same when one laughs out of love. I’ve come to tell an old truth with a new joke: you have confused haste with pilgrimage and the screen with the sacrament. I did not return to seek my age; I returned to rescue yours.

L.M. —They say we have no dogmas, that we are pluralists.

G.K.C. —Oh, you have dogmas! You simply don’t confess them; you advertise them. The most sacred is this: “Nothing is sacred.” And you worship it with the devotion of a monk without a monastery. I have seen humbler temples than your auditoriums, and less gullible pious women than your innovation summits.

L.M. —We also have new sins: climatic, economic, technological…

G.K.C. —They are old sins dressed in lab coats. Man prefers to blame himself for what he cannot confess. His sins horrify him, so he translates them into “system failures.” It is easier to request funding than forgiveness. And yet, the moral accounting of the universe admits no accountants: one pays either with tears or with cynicism, and cynicism is hell’s usury.

L.M. —You accuse us of having forgotten what is good. What, then, is good?

G.K.C. —Good is what makes man more man. Good is a small home with a great duty. Good is a “yes” that commits and a “no” that saves. Good is kneeling before the eternal in order not to kneel before the ridiculous. Good is the laughter that unmasks the tyrant and the silence that lets truth speak. Everything else is stage props for the modern drama.

L.M. —We are asked for results; we are measured in numbers. The world is governed by metrics.

G.K.C. —And by fears. The figure is the rosary of the unbeliever: he runs it through his fingers so as not to think about the soul. You are exact in your statistics and indeterminate in your destiny. You have confused the clock with Judgment Day. When everything is a KPI, sin ceases to exist, and stupidity becomes a profession.

L.M. —Perhaps we have chosen complexity. Clarity frightens us.

G.K.C. —Of course: clarity demands conversion; complexity, seminars. Truth is simple like a bell; error is complex like an excuse. You have made ambiguity a professorship and doubt a virtue. Doubt can be a path; settling in the desert is spiritual tourism.

L.M. —Let’s talk about love: we have freed it from old bonds.

G.K.C. —You have freed the fish from the water. You call suffocation freedom, and celebrate it because the fish convulses enthusiastically. Love is free when it promises, strong when it obeys, fruitful when it limits itself. A fire without a hearth is either wildfire or ash. That is why marriage is heroism for adults and a stumbling block for adolescents with credit cards.

L.M. —Politics: is there anything to save?

G.K.C. —As long as there are men with necks and consciences, there is something to save. But politics without truth and without virtue is reduced to the art of selling mirages at desert prices. In the name of the people, the State is worshiped; in the name of freedom, the banks are worshiped; and in the name of peace, the machine is worshiped. The old temptation has not changed: “All this I will give you, if you bow down and adore me.” The devil keeps offering shortcuts; you have patented the highway.

L.M. —And the poor? Where is he in your irony?

G.K.C. —At the center. The poor is a sacrament of reality: he proves that the world does not work even when the Wi-Fi does. He is not saved with statistics but with friendship. Charity that does not smell of soup and tears is philanthropy with a costume.

L.M. —You defended small property. Today it seems illusory.

G.K.C. —Illusory is freedom without keys. A democracy where no one can close his door is not a democracy: it is a hotel. The rich man who owns the neighborhood and the bureaucrat who decrees that nothing belongs to anyone are two forms of the same laziness: both hate limits. But limits are the grammar of love: without “mine” and “yours” there is no “ours.”

L.M. —Contemporary art: do you still believe in it?

G.K.C. —I believe in art that believes in something. An artist can paint shadows if he knows where the light is. But if he removes the light from the world, all he has left is to exhibit his own penumbra in high definition. Modern art has become the autobiography of boredom. When heaven is forbidden, the artist ends up describing his ceiling.

L.M. —They will say your faith mutilates imagination.

G.K.C. —On the contrary: it baptizes it. Dogmas are the fixed stars that allow the poet to trace constellations. Without dogmas, the sky is a jumble of fireflies. Imagination without truth is a child with matches in a barn.

L.M. —Technology. We have united the world.

G.K.C. —And you have disunited homes. Technology is like alcohol: you must know how to drink it. A phone that brings me closer to the distant and farther from the nearby is a portable idol. When conversation with the machine replaces conversation with the child, we have sold our birthright for a plate of pixels.

L.M. —You accuse us of idolatry of the self.

G.K.C. —Yes: the polytheism of screens and the monotheism of the mirror. You worship a thousand things so as not to admit you worship only one: your own will. But your will is too small to satisfy itself. The self is a stomach that never says enough. It is calmed only when it kneels before someone greater than itself.

L.M. —Death. We avoid it with euphemisms.

G.K.C. —And with anesthesia. You have banished the cemetery to the perimeter of the moral map. But death is the teacher of realism: it removes your costume, returns your name, and asks what you have loved. The world fears death because it has lost the art of dying: dying forgiving, dying grateful, dying blessing. A good Christian dies like trees in autumn: leaving seeds.

L.M. —And hope? Where is it bought?

G.K.C. —It is not bought: it is received. That is why it offends the market. Hope is a loan from heaven that is repaid with fidelity. You confuse hope with optimism; the optimist believes everything will turn out well; the hopeful knows everything can be redeemed. Even the 21st century. Even me, who was a sinner with a great sense of humor.

L.M. —They will call you reactionary.

G.K.C. —Let them. If a train is heading toward the abyss, reacting is sensible. Modern words have been manufactured to avoid shame. “Progress” means “more of the same with better graphics.” “Inclusion” means “anything except what bothers us.” “Tolerance” means “silence for those who dissent.” I prefer the old word: conversion.

L.M. —How does one convert such a world?

G.K.C. —As one lights a candle: by bringing it close to another. No one is saved by speeches; one is saved by saints. A man who fulfills his duty in a small house builds more civilization than a hundred influencers with megaphones. History is governed by a carpenter who did not write a book. And yet, all books seek him.

L.M. —Who could such a saint be today?

G.K.C. —A mother who sets the table and blesses the absent. A father who returns home and kneels because it is never too late. A teacher who teaches grammar as if he were teaching justice. A doctor who remembers that wounds smell of son. A judge who would rather lose a promotion than lose his soul. A young man who turns off his phone to look at the stars. A young woman who discovers that purity is not fear, but strength.

L.M. —And if no one listens?

G.K.C. —Then God will, and that is enough. The great works have been whispered against the noise. A single faithful family sustains an entire neighborhood; a single silent monastery sustains an era; a single Mass sustains the world. When everything seems lost, remember that the universe was saved by a woman who said “yes” and a man who remained silent.

L.M. —You ask us to kneel.

G.K.C. —I ask you to rise from the floor. Whoever does not kneel before God ends up crawling before the State, the Market, or Fashion. To kneel is to affirm that heaven exists; to crawl is to admit that only the ground exists. The 21st century crawls with elegance.

L.M. —What do we do tomorrow when we wake up?

G.K.C. —Three things: give thanks, obey, laugh. Give thanks for being alive and for not being the center of the cosmos. Obey the truth you already know; do not wait for a notification. And laugh: laugh at the solemnity of tyrants, the grandiloquence of experts, and the misery of your own vanities. The devil cannot bear laughter because it reminds him he is small.

L.M. —Will you forgive us, then?

G.K.C. —I did not come to forgive: I came to beg you to allow yourselves to be forgiven. Mercy is an ocean; only the proud die of thirst on the shore. Your century is exhausted by options and thirsty for absolution. You do not need more alternatives; you need more altars.

L.M. —Leave us your testament, a final will.

G.K.C. —I leave my cane to knock down idols, my sherry glass to toast sanity, and my paradoxes so you do not forget that truth is more fun than lies. I leave a map with four cardinal points: home, altar, school, and public square. If you lose one, you will lose them all. And above all, I leave my laughter: carry it as sword and shield.

L.M. —And the epitaph?

G.K.C. —Write: “Here lies a man who laughed at himself so he could kneel without falling.” If you wish to add something, write: “He told us that what was wrong in the world was not asking what was right, and that what is right begins with giving thanks.”

Silence.

The screens remain on, but the library seems both older and younger at once. A bell—where from?—rings in the distance. Pipe smoke sketches a door: behind it, an ordinary light, domestic, like a kitchen left on. L.M. tries to speak, but the enormous Englishman is no longer there. Only the scent of wood and wine remains, and the immense sensation that reality—that old queen—has sat once more upon her throne.

L.M. —Mr. Chesterton…

The word does not find its owner and, for the first time in years, it is not needed. The interviewer breathes, crosses himself without noticing, pockets his phone, and walks toward the street, where the rain shines with something new, as if each drop were a small truth falling from the sky.

OMO

IF MOTHERS DEMAND A LAW THAT ALLOWS THEM TO MURDER THEIR CHILDREN...

 

ANACLETO DIXIT

"...It can also be said that youth—because of its elevated and permanent boldness—is naturally Christian. And it can be said further: youth is completed, strengthened, and protected against weakening or extinction by placing itself under the perpetually youthful breath of Christ. Because Christianity—both in the strength of its ideological structure and in its historical currents—is the doctrine of risk and the direction of life to victoriously overcome all risks. Because it is not so small to dare to face the risks of being a saint. Much less the risks of being a martyr. And Christianity—considered ideologically and historically—is the doctrine of holy boldness, of holiness, and of goodness. Joining your two hands, wet in the new wineskin of life, youth, with the perennial youth of Christ, is the same as defining the direction of your own boldness and placing it in fruitful and direct function with goodness, truth, and  destiny itself." 

(Anacleto González Flores, You Will Be King, 1950)

And you... Do you practice charity? Meditate on it before God.