Shedding Light On The Luminous

You know what the problem is with the “woke folk?”  They believe that everything can be improved on.  Everything must be constantly changed in order to make it more “relevant” to the current whims of the world.  They fail to realize that there are some things that should be left alone.  Certainly, there’s a lot that can be improved on, but God’s creation is not one of them.  For example, God created Adam and Eve, “Man and woman he created them.”  That wasn’t good enough for our progressive woke friends.  A bunch of them, non-educated yet fancying themselves as wise and enlightened, looked at the two genders, male and female, and exclaimed, “What?  Only two genders?  That’s a very poor effort by this so-called god!  We can improve on that!”  And so they came up with a few more imaginary genders.  I was told by a high-school student a year or two ago that there are now 57 genders, not to mention having no gender at all.  It’s all silly nonsense of course but alarming nevertheless, as their discovery is now forced upon us as another dogma of their religion of secularism.  If you defy this dogma, you will be punished.  Many have been.

But why do I mention this on Rosary Sunday?  Because it gives us a significant glimpse into the perverse mindset of the modernist progressives, the ones who with that mindset concocted the idea of improving on the Rosary.  At the hands of this same destructive force of progressivism, this time in the Vatican II Church, the Rosary has suffered the same fate as the two genders, the Mass, and to be honest, anything else these foolish and irrational liberals could get their hands on.  After Vatican II, this progressive faction, now comfortably infiltrated within the highest echelons of power in Rome, started implementing their destructive error that everything must be changed.  Nothing must be left intact.  The Mass was the primary target of their iconoclast hammers.  Freemason Annibale Bugnini had already paved the way for that with his vicious changes to the liturgy in the 1950s and early 60s.  But as soon as he succeeded destroying the Mass, he immediately turned his attention to other traditional forms of worship.  In 1972 Bugnini proposed a massive change to the Rosary.  Fortunately, though, his proposals were rejected by Paul VI.  Even Paul VI, a confirmed modernist himself, could not bring himself to change the Rosary, a devotion that had been personally given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin herself.  He even referred to the wise distribution of the Rosary into three cycles, which he described as representing “the joy of the messianic times, the salvific suffering of Christ, and the glory of the risen Lord.”  He confirmed the correspondence between the 150 Hail Marys of the Rosary and the 150 psalms of the scriptural Psalter, and flatly refused to upset the symmetry and significance of the Rosary’s format.

And then came John Paul II.  To be fair to him, the changes he introduced to the Rosary were not nearly as sweeping as those envisaged by Annibale Bugnini.  Bugnini, the destroyer of the Mass, had planned to reduce the Our Fathers from six to only one at the very beginning of the Rosary.  He wanted to chop the Hail Mary in two so that only the first half would be recited on each bead instead of the full prayer.  The second half would be said only after the tenth Hail Mary of each Mystery.  At least we were spared that desecration of our Lady’s gift.  However, the entire symmetry of the Rosary was essentially annihilated by John Paul’s introduction of his “luminous mysteries.” No longer could the Rosary, now made up of two hundred Hail Marys, claim to be the Psalter of Our Lady, paralleling the 150 psalms of the scriptural psalter.  And even worse, the Rosary would lose its triune element of joys, sorrows, and glory, a feature which represents a perfect reflection of the Redemption Story, not to mention our own life experiences.

This trinity of joy, sorrow and glory is derived from the triune nature of God himself, that Most Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  Our very life is a trinity of joys, sorrows and eventual glory.  Where does the notion of “illumination” come into play to destroy this triple symmetry and give the Story of Redemption and the story of our own lives a separate fourth element? The Freemasons like to place an all-seeing eye into their triangular symbol of God, thereby introducing a fourth element into the three Persons of the Holy Trinity.  Could these deceptively innocent “luminous mysteries” be the equivalent of that all-seeing eye of the Illuminati, an attempt to enlighten the Catholic Church so long “enslaved in the darkness of superstition” (which in reality is faith)?  The luminous mysteries of the Illuminati!  What do these agents of the Devil want?  Quite simply, to destroy the whole belief system in God by raising man to the level of God.  So is man now God?  Are we now the fourth Person of the Blessed Trinity, a trinity which is no longer even a Trinity?  Three becomes four, and Freemasonry raises humanity to the divine, making man his own god.  It is blasphemy and another attack on God and his Church by the Devil himself.  As a member of this chapel pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago, if we divide the 150 Hail Mary’s of the Rosary by three, the divine number of the Blessed Trinity, we get 50.  But if we add the 50 Hail Marys of the Luminous Mysteries to make 200 Hail Marys in all, what happens when we divide that 200 by three, what do have then?  Do the math!  66.6!  Things begin to fall into place…

It does not require a conspiracy theory, however, to know that the “luminous mysteries” have no place in our contemplation of the story of our Redemption.  For it is also the story of our life.  We go through life on one long rollercoaster, fluctuating between being happy and being sorrowful.  The Joys and Sorrows of the Rosary reflect that, and the Glories make sense of it all.  The three elements of joy, sorrow and glory enlighten us, illuminate us if you will, allowing us to realize that any joys in this life are purely transitory and cannot be ends in themselves, and to realize that we should patiently accept all the sorrows that God permits as a way of participating in our blessed Saviour’s act of Redemption, his Passion and Cross.  This illumination for us of the true meaning of life, with its joys and sorrows providing the means to the glorious reward that will be ours if we use them correctly.  Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries together present to us the single source of God’s Light, Christ himself, the Light of the World who illuminates our darkness and saving us from the fires of hell.  We do not require any “luminous” mysteries invented by man to enlighten us further.  God is all-wise, and we should not dare to presume that we can improve on the way he made things to be.

The Rosary is perfect in its triple structure of joy, sorrow and glory.  It is perfect in its triple contents, the joyful, sorrowful and glorious events of our Lord’s life, death and resurrection.  It is perfect in the way it answers every aspect of our lives that the pagan woke so abysmally fail to understand.  The modernists may try to improve on our blessed Lady’s Rosary with their pathetic addition of luminous mysteries.  But as Catholics we reject them, firmly and confidently preserving tradition, the unchangeable faith of our fathers.  We preserve the traditional Rosary by praying it, and pray it we must.  For we know that the Rosary is a gift from the all-wise God, who knew what he was doing.