Father Arnold Trauner of IMBC preaches about Our Lady of Good Counsel, Mother of the Good Shepherd 
My dearly beloved in Our Lord, 
 
On this 2nd Sunday after Easter, the Good Shepherd Sunday as it is called after the passage of the Gospel, we celebrate this year the feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel which Holy Church celebrates on April 26th. Our Lady is also honored by the Church as the Mother of the Divine Shepherd, on a feast celebrated on September 3rd. 
As I said last Sunday, the enemies of God, of Christ and of his Church have succeeded in overthrowing the Catholic thrones and altars. The natural and the spiritual society are in disarray. - In opposition to this, Our Lady Conceived without sin is venerated by the Church as being like an army in battle array: “Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?” (Cant. 6,9) She was never perplexed or clueless, and therefore we can and shall invoke her all the more as the Mother of Good Counsel, in times and circumstances where all seems upside down and people don’t seem to know where to turn their heads. 
Sheep without their shepherd are as good as defenseless; we see what has happened to Catholics since the days of Vatican2! Some souls are waking up now – better late than never, as I can say from my own experience! – on seeing how quickly and how willingly the mercenaries, the wolfs in sheep’s clothing, have fled at the first signs of danger. In many places and countries the “pastors” could not lock their churches quickly enough, often earlier than imposed by the civil authorities. This goes even beyond the image used by Our Lord’s parable: The “pastors” or rather the false shepherds, the mercenaries, locking themselves up behind solid church doors and walls and leaving the sheep outside in the cold, the wind and all kinds of dangers! 
We, the traditionalist clergy, have been left out in the cold and rain for a long time, that is, defenseless against the civil authorities which at best tolerate us. We have been saying for a long time that the Vatican2 popes and bishops are not the authority representing Our Lord – now they have proven it beyond any reasonable doubt, for believers and unbelievers. 
Things are so upside down, so crazy that never has it been more timely and necessary to invoke Our Lady that she may give us her good counsels! Things have gone bad – and I believe that after a short let-off they will get much worse; the let-off after this real life exercise (as it has been called by the American Mike Pompeo) being necessary because the infrastructure for the “real thing” is not in place yet in our countries, to the difference of China where people are already supervised, categorized and penalized if they leave the path of democratic and civil virtue! 
What is the good counsel of Our Lady? It is all contained in the last of the seven words she has spoken in the Gospel: “His mother saith to the waiters: Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye.” (Jn 2,5) After having asked and incited her Son to operate the first miracle of his public life at the wedding in Cana, she retires into silence with these words! Now we are to listen to “whatsoever he shall say to us”. All those who act according to Our Lady’s exhortation and counsel, are on the path to Heaven. Those who do not heed her voice, are on the “highway to Hell”, on the broad and easy road that leads to perdition. 
By this last counsel of hers, Our Lady shows how fiercely opposed she is to “modern” thinking and lifestyle. The “moderns” have become what they are because they want to make abstraction from all that is reasonable, clear and obvious. They only want what they want: they are voluntarists. They have perverted their mind and soul by dumping their brains. Let me explain. 
Christian philosophy – psychology in the present case – teaches that reason or intelligence is the foremost faculty of the human soul. Only through reason our soul is enlightened. Reason informs the second faculty, the will power: for reason is made to know what is true, and the will power is made to embrace the truth as its good. The will itself is blind, it needs to be enlightened by the reasoning power. Voluntaristic modern man inverts the natural order and puts the will power above reason. Thus his thinking and his life are not informed by and conformed to the truth; but he puts first what he wants, and then everything else has to happen as a function of this his sovereign will. 
A recent author – an American Jesuit who died last year, Fr James Schall – wrote a chapter called “The ‘declaration’ of voluntarism”. It is a kind of syllabus of errors that derive from this intellectual deviation which is voluntarism. He writes among other statements – which are false, of course: 
- We hold that any “law” of nature or polity can be other than it is. 
- Civil law is the only law human beings are not free to disobey, as it belongs to everyone. This limitation of personal freedom is the meaning of “common good” or “commonweal”. 
- Society’s purpose is to enable human beings to be whatever they chose to be, whatever it is. 
- Children belong to whoever takes care of them. Civil society decides who is qualified to exercise this role. 
- The only intelligence in the universe belongs to men. It enables them to impose their own “values” on the world. These “values” change according to the desires of the human being. 
Most of this sounds – unfortunately – very familiar to our ears. We have heard it so many times, we witness the consequences of this lunatic and devious teaching and thinking as the world falls to pieces. 
It is the opposite of Our Lady’s counsel: “Do whatever my Son, the Son of God made man, will tell you to do.” She knows that truth is objective; that truth comes to us through the right use of the God-given faculties of our soul; that natural and supernatural truth – the latter revealed to us by God – are unchanging, and unchanged even if we decide not to adhere to them… Our wrongful thinking will change the actual reality, but it will never change the truth as such! 
We will, if God grants us life and force, reflect further on this topic, namely on the multiple consequences of this altered and vicious thinking for the social life. 
Let us conclude with an appeal to Christian common sense: Let us not be fooled by senseless or vicious statements. Their number is legion; you cannot read one piece of news or information without stumbling over quite a bit of such non-sense! A stone is a stone, no matter whether you decide to knock it on your head or to eat it – it has not been made for that, purely and simply, but for building and similar purposes. A fool remains a fool, no matter how many or how few words he utters. “Moderns” are the oldest and most boring kind of men because they follow the one who is a liar and murderer from the beginning, Satan, as Our Lord so clearly told his disciples. Sinners and the just will likewise die the earthly death – but their eternal fate is very different: eternal life and happiness, or “the second death” in Hell, as St John puts it (Apc 2,11; 20,6.14; 21,8). 
Our Lady, Mother of Good Counsel, Mother of the Divine Shepherd – Pray for us! We know how tainted we are by the consequences of sin - Domina, salva nos, perimus! O Lady, save us, lest we drown! - Teach us and help us to heed your good counsel, that we may follow your Son’s teaching and thus make our way to Heaven. 
 
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. 
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