Talk about the contrast of two countries! The difference of night and day, north and south. While one country, the United States is fast losing its soul, it appears possible that Chile might just be regaining hers. Who isn't aware by now of the valiant effort of rescuers, spearheaded by the dauntless leadership of Chile's President Juan Miguel Sebastián Piñera? All can give a Te Deum today after bringing to the desert surface 33 never-say-die Chilean miners from the very bowels of hell, so to speak. As one miner told reporters, "I was with God and with the devil, and I reached out for God." Indeed chalk this one up to a merciful and loving Triune God, not Allah. We can only hope and pray the world learned a valuable lesson: never doubt the providence of Almighty God; never doubt the power of the Virgin Mary who is so revered by those who speak the Romance languages, especially Espanol. Do you think the De Profundis prayers that we begin praying in 17 days will have more meaning to these 33 men and their families? Translated, the beginning of Psalm 129 is "Out of the depths." Out of the depths indeed they have been saved. Their prayers answered.

    In the midst of so much terror and fear in the world, all the hateful political rhetoric being spewed on all mediums as the elections grow nearer here in the United States, Americans as well as people the world over were all treated to good news for a change and they are etched in our memories, those moments of sheer emotional ecstasy to see these Chilean colliers conveyed one by one in a bullet-like capsule, reminiscient of those containers used by banks zipping through tubes, over 2000 feet from their cocoon dubbed "Esperanza" (Hope) deep beneath a collapsed copper mine to fresh air and the loving hug of their wives, families and Piñera himself along with the First Lady of Chile, his wife Cecilia Morel Montes Piñera; not to mention other dignitaries and the noble, enthusiastic rescuers, many who worked with the trapped miners. All teamed together, uniting all of Chile behind their efforts. Yes, we're not afraid to admit the tears flowed freely in joy over the rescue of those affectionately and patriotically called "the angels of the bicentennial." Yes, a job well done; a job that could never have been possible without the providence of the Triune God and devotion to the Virgin. After all, how could Our Lady fail a mine named after her chaste earthly spouse San Jose (good St. Joseph)?

    It also could not be possible without the trapped men's faith that God would see them through their ordeal; nor could they have held out hope had they not the support of their worried families and the outstanding attitude of Piñera, a committed Catholic, albeit conciliar, yet one who is steeped in trust in God and who never gave up hope even though advisors counseled him not to promise too much. Somehow, he knew Mary would prevail through the multitude of prayers he asked his countrymen to pray. Sound familiar? We remember a holy Pontiff who did the same for Our Lady to effect a miracle at a place called Lepanto in the year 1571 on the 7th of October. Pope St. Pius V proclaimed Mary most holy as Our Lady of Victory and it is indeed a victory 439 years later in one of the few countries in South America that has not gone communist.

    As stated in our 93rd Anniversary issue yesterday in commemorating the final apparition at Fatima and the Miracle of the Sun, this was another miracle, this time the "Miracle of the Chilean Sons." We also noted the significance that it was 69 days since they were trapped and the number seemed almost too coincidental - 33 miners. It's definitely a Godincidence for 33 is not only a divine number, but the very age Christ was. Our Lord assuaged all that it is very possible with God in St. Matthew 19: 26, St. Mark 10: 27 and St. Luke 18: 27. Thank God Piñera believed. Also, thank God for a small Berlin, Pennsylvania company that came up with a solution for a special drill and expedited their rescue; a massive task in drilling through 2000 feet of solid rock. Thank God for the leadership of the crew's supervisor Luis Urzua who served as the Don Juan of Austria to the President's Pius V. Urzua is a former soccer player who exhibited calm throughout. This born leader and foreman of the group, huddled the men once he realized their plight back in August and set up a rigid schedule of conservation for their survival. As this is written at 5:57 p.m. on October 13, it is 9:57 p.m. in Chile and I admit I have the television on Fox News as the final miner Luis has just reached the surface. I can't help but marvel at their trust in God and in their fellow man. Do we have that kind of trust?

    Let us not forget that, in addition to providence, it took good ol' American ingenuity and a tribute to free enterprise. The latter is definitely under assault these days, moreso in the last two years under the Obama Administration. However, as Dr. Thomas A. Droleskey has pointed out numerous times in his magnificent articles, we have done this to ourselves because we have abandoned God. We can only hope and pray we take a page from what just occurred in Chile and repent.

    Ah, yes, repent. That brings us to the essence of this commentary and what America can do to reverse the hellish course she is on. We all need to do private and public expiation for the sins of our nation. Just as the citizens of Nineve donned sacklcoth and ashes to stay the hand of God by listening to the Lord's chosen prophet Jonah, so also we have Our Lady's guidance and dire warnings from Quito, Ecuador in the seventeenth century; La Salette in the nineteenth century, and Fatima in the twentieth century of what we needed to do or else. Now, because we did not fully respond as Heaven willed, we are in the "or else" stage and it isn't pretty. Buckle in, folks, because it's going to be a rough road ahead.

    When will we learn? We didn't learn from Sacred Scripture, or the prophesies of saints and the Mother of God. Nor did we learn from a wise priest named Father F. J. Remier, C.M. who, in 1935 wrote the following:

    "As a member of society and a citizen of your country, you must unite with the rest in making the atonement and reparation which Divine Justice requires for the public and national sins committed in the community in which you live.

    By public and national sins we understand certain sins of a graver nature which are committed on so large a scale by so many persons in a community, be it a city, or a province, or an entire nation, that they are attributed to the community as a body and not merely to this or that individual. Sins of this kind are: Apostasy from Faith, irreligion and forgetfulness of God; godless education of the young; profanation of God's holy Name, cursing blasphemy and perjury; the desecration of the Lord's Day; immodest and scandalous fashions; immoral art, literature and amusements; divorce and adultery sanctioned by iniquitous state laws [including homosexuality]; dishonesty, injustice and oppression of the poor; murder and race suicide [abortion and euthanasia]; and finally, those wild orgies of gross immorality and unrestrained license which periodically disgrace, public festivities and celebrations, or occur in connection with balls, dances, banquets and the like.

    God is exceedingly patient and long-suffering, and does not willingly inflict general chastisements, however richly they may be deserved by a community. He rather desires that His offending children seek His pardon by means of a timely repentance and conversion. He waited a hundred years before He sent the deluge which He had commissioned Noe to announce. He allowed forty years to elapse between the prediction of Our Lord of the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the fulfillment of that prediction by the Romans in the year 70; and He spared the city of Nineve altogether because its inhabitants immediately left off sinning and hastened to do penance at the preaching of Jonas.

    God acts in this way still. He often waits a long time before inflicting on sinful cities and nations those more extensive chastisements which their multiplied iniquities call for. He desiresto spare them to a sense of their duty and to timely repentance and conversion. But if in spite of these delays they obstinately refuse to enter into themselves and to leave off sinning; if they continue in their wickedness, sometimes even to the extent of sinning more boldly because their evil deeds are not punished at once, then the hour must come in which the measure of their iniquity is filled to overflowing. That hour will mark the beginning of some general visitation which will fall heavily on the guilty community as a just punishment of its long, continued transgressions of God's Holy Law - destructive floods or storms, conflagrations, earthquakes, seasons of scarcity and famine; epidemics and pestilences; and especially the horrors of rebellions and revolutions, and of civil and international wars.

    Divine Justice makes use of these evils for the punishment and correction of a sinful people much the same as a wise father uses the rod for the chastisement and betterment of a wayward child.

    Nor is it always necessary that God send such chastisement for public sins, as He sent the deluge or the destruction of Jerusalem. There are many sins which contain in themselves the seeds of future public suffering, just as the acorn contains the gigantic oak. If such sins prevail for a sufficiently long time, unchecked and unrepented, they are bound to produce such conditions in the social order as to make certain calamities unavoidable."

    We share this from a handout in Our Lady of Fatima traditional Catholic parish bulletin this past Sunday. No doubt it was circulated by the national organization America Needs Fatima which has organized annually a Rosary Rally on the Saturday closest to the date of the final apparition at Fatima. Click the link or the graphic below.

   This year it falls on October 16 and over 5000 Rosary captains are marshalling Catholics to come together in the public square, so to speak, to pray the Rosary in expiation of sins - our own and others - both private and public. What greater sin does our nation have on the books than abortion?!! Father Remier has shown above why it is vital that public sins be atoned for in public and what he says next proves he was a prophet for our times for when you read it you'll realize he was talking about 2010. Consider:

   "Take, for example, the sin of godless education, that is, education of youth without religion. Where such a system has been adopted, the necessary results must be the following: After two or three generations the knowledge of God will disappear more or less completely among the people; the sense of right and wrong will be lost; good will be called evil, and evil good; there will be no more respect for the moral law; the depravity of youth will grow worse and worse; dishonesty and corruption will prevail in business, in the courts, in the legislature, and in the government itself; taxes will be misappropriated or disappear in the pockets of grafters; heavy expenses will be necessary to maintain the growing number of asylums, juvenile courts, reform schools and prisons; there will be no security to to honor property and life; the relations between capital and labor will be strained to the breaking point, so that violence and bloodshed will become inevitable; family life will be disrupted by adultery, divorce and free love; national rivalries, jealousies and hatreds, provoked by commercial greed, grow more and more intense, until they lead to international wars with their unspeakable misery to millions. Nations that sow the whirlwhind must reap the storm."

    Reread that paragraph and you'll see how America's indoctrination camps - godless education of the public school system that has so influenced and corrupted Catholic education - has been the domino that has toppled values and virtues. Yes, we can blame the conciliarists who allowed the wobble by taking their eyes off Catholic truth in compromising with the world, but man has a free will and he should know better. Yet, as blithering bleating sheep we all followed without thinking for ourselves. What if Piñera had taken the advice of those counseling him to not hold out much hope? What if he had done the politically expedient thing most politicians would do and procrastinate, appoint committees to waste time and cast a pall over the entire process. Just think of the BP oil spill and our own government's feeble response and buck-passing.

    Even though Chile is not immune for a law was passed eleven years ago declaring religious freedom and opening the doors to weaken Catholicism which has been the bulwark of faith for several centuries and at last count registered over 17 million Catholics for 70% of the population. Even though other religions are recognized now, Catholicism still enjoys a privileged place in all echelons; one of the few countries left in the world that does so.

    We can see in Fr. Remier's paragraph above how good is today called evil and evil good. What better example than to call sodomy gay? We see class warfare heating up where capitalism is going head to head against the socialist unions. Can the upcoming elections help? Somewhat, but is it not, for the most part the lesser of two evils we would be electing? In all truth if the conservatives win out and the tea party tsunami continues to gain then it might just delay the inevitable. The only way to truly stave off the coming chastisement is to follow the example of the Ninevites and make atonement for our sins publicly by calling upon Heaven to forgive and in praying that as a nation we will turn from sin and repent. That begins by not being afraid to pray in public and using the greatest weapon we have against the world, the flesh and the devil outside of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. That is the holy Rosary.

    "Public and national sins msut be expiated in this world for the very simple reason that they cannot be expiated in the next. In the world to come families, cities, provinces, states, and nations will have no continued corporate existence. There, men and women will exist merely as individuals, without being united by those social, civil, political and national bonds which are necessary in this life for welfare and preservation of the human race.

    In eternity, they will individually enjoy the fruits of their life on earth - the good will possess the kingdom of God in Heaven, while the wicked shall suffer for their evil deeds in the unquenchable fire of Hell. But as public sins require public expiation, and as this expiation cannot be made in this next life, it is clear that it must be made on this side of the grave."

    Think of the rapidity with which the rescue workers were ferried up through the narrow vertical tunnel. With each one it seemed to go more swiftly until all 33 were delivered safely, all on October 13. Now multiply the rapidity and distance by a zillion zillion zillion times a zillion zillion zillion (don't try and count) and it pales compared to the rapidity and success of the bouquet of Ave's ascending to Heaven. The more the merrier. We have had several decades of close calls, many natural and man-made disasters with really a minimal loss of life in comparison. How much longer will we try God's patience? We have the opportunity to stave off the hand of God for in the time of Abraham all God needed was ten just men to prevent the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Can we not find ten just men on every block in America to step up and expiate for the sins of our nation? Perhaps we should enlist the know-how of President Piñera and the 33 just men who stared death in the face and survived.

    The efficiency in which this rescue was carried out prompts us to ask if we couldn't make a trade straight up, Barack Hussein Obama for Sebastián Piñera (in red jacket on far right), but then one realizes that would not be fair to our Chilean brethren. At the same time, maybe ol' Barry could see fit to give Sebastián his Nobel Peace Prize for at least the president of Chile has done something to deserve it. Just compare how Obama handled the oil spill and how Piñera wasted no time and put lives before his political life. Did you also notice there were no teleprompters when Piñera, who was present for the entire 22 plus hours in welcoming each rescued miner personally, spoke for twenty minutes afterwards to the world from the heart? But then when one trusts in God despite what man says, one can speak fluently from the heart; when one manipulates his fellow men for his own political gain, working to push God into the background, well, uuhhmmm, ahhhhh, uhhhmmmm. Yet, it doesn't hurt to let it be known that the annointed narcissistic one is up for trade for the best offer, and the faster the better. We can start by giving the pink slip to his cronies in Congress and we can back that up by intensifying our prayers, penance and expiation. Considering the exhilaration of this night over the success of the rescue, let us stay on a high and work on the rescue of souls.

    On October 16 let's all come together and send a message that we're ready and willing. Yes, it's okay to celebrate the rescue of the Chilean miracle tonight and tomorrow as the church bells throughout Chile ring out in joyous gratitude, but keep in mind: this Saturday here in America we have our own mission to accomplish. Souls are trapped in satan's clutches. It's time to free them. Soul Rescue by means of Public Expiation commences at High Noon!