I wish to apologize profoundly, and most penitently, for the fact that this website has not been adequately updated over the past six months, let alone replaced by the new multimedia site (which will finally launch in a few days, thanks be to God).

These website doldrums have been due to an unremitting and unprecedented series of setbacks over the past several months, including difficulties and disasters of a personal, technical, and financial nature.

 

I'll give you one example of such a catastrophe: the complete collapse, like a row of dominos before my astonished eyes, of an entire room of dozens of board-and-brick bookshelves in my St. Jerome Study Center (which occupies the entirety of our home's fully finished basement), with several accompanying physical injuries sustained therein. This occured on my birthday (April 8), of all days, and resulted in my spending nearly the entirety of that birthday, from 10 am to past midnight, in my basement trying to recover from the disaster. Some books were permanently damaged -- some torn apart, some water-damaged (the avalanche of cascading bricks actually cracked open an exposed water pipe on one wall) -- and had to be throw away as utterly unusable.

This series of setbacks unfortunately coincided with, and was exacerbated by, an unprecedented level of personal and organizational poverty during 2013 due to sales and donations hitting a rock-bottom all-time low. This left me with very few resources to address my problems and overcome the obstacles in order to become fully functional again.

Another of the handicaps I've been struggling under has been the technical difficulties I've been plagued with whenever attempting to upload, to this existing "old" website, any essays and updates. This includes even this present update: I just spent over an hour this morning with this present website's word processor completely frozen, and another hour this evening attempting to remember and re-type an hour's worth of revisions that abruptly vanished. The new website, designed with world-famous WordPress, fortunately solves all such problems.

Many is the time since my last posting on March 27 that I've sat down and written an extensive essay on the feast day of a key patron saint of this apostolate, to explain his or her relevance to my work and to the current crisis, as well as to bring you up to date on some exciting new discoveries I've made, on the many projects I've been working on and the trips I've taken (such as a weekend-long debate I had in Texas in July with a well-known anti-Catholic fundamentalist), only to find myself thwarted by one maddening malfunction after another.

This happened repeatedly, and frustratingly, on such eagerly anticipated days as:

 

March 31: Easter Sunday, my first attempt to update my website on what I deemed an appropriate and auspicious day, only to be stumped several times that day.

April 5: The feast of St. Vincent Ferrer, whose God-approved and miracle-attested apostolate during the Great Western Schism is erroneously and irrelevantly cited as justification by those who wish to operate as self-made traditionalist Catholic clergy (or religious) "without a license" in these times, as I explained in a lengthy essay I wrote on that occasion.

April 10: The feast of Ezekiel, the Old Testament prophet whose 48-chapter book I excitedly re-read in early April; I was agog (not to be confused with the Gog and Magog of Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39) at how much forgotten material in that prophetic book is vitally relevant to the hiatus in the Church's normal worship and sacramental life that the current crisis constitutes. (A complete exposition of the entire book, chapter by chapter, will be serialized on the new website.)

April 13: The feast of St. Hermengild, one of the key patron saints of this lay apostolate, Biblical Foundations International (hereafter "BFI"). His courageous example of choosing a particularly gruesome death rather than receiving Holy Communion from the hand of an unorthodox bishop reminds us that we must never compromise our Catholic Faith by receiving sacraments from the hands of heretics, contrary to what most "traditionalists" -- from pseudo-Benedictine brothers to pseudo-societies dedicated to sainted popes -- counsel you to do today.

 

(If you haven't already done so, you might wish to order our best-selling CD, "Communion with Heretics or Communion with Hermengild?" for only $9.95 plus shipping from our online store, www.gerrymatatics.org/shop, for a complete analysis of this crucial issue.)

May 2: The feast of St. Athanasius, whose relevance to our times of apostasy I've previously discussed at length in my "Plot Against the Church" series. In the essay I composed this year on his feast-day I demonstrated the falsity of the SSPX's (and the late Michael Davies's) claim that Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the SSPX, constitutes "the St. Athanasius of our time," when in fact Lefebvre was the precise opposite of the embattled saint of the Arian crisis.

May 5: The feast of St. Pius V, on which I wrote a similar essay pointing out that the so-called Society of St. Pius V (who claim the patronage of this pontiff), whenever they polemicize against the inconsistent SSPX, illogically undermine the very foundation of their own authority, since the SSPV was founded by former members of the SSPX who were expelled from that illegitimate order. (And the few clergy the SSPV has acquired since then through other, equally illegitimate, channels are hobbled by the same handicap.)

May 13: The feast of St. Robert Bellarmine, the great Doctor of the Church and another of the faces on BFI's metaphorical "Mount Rushmore" of key "founding father" patron saints. His clear teaching is particularly prized for two points that are extremely pertinent to the problem-ridden predicament we find ourselves in today:

 

First, that the modern-day heretics occupying (or more accurately, usurping) offices in the Church cannot be considered lawful occupants of those offices, up to and including the papacy itself.

 

Second, that the Church's constant teaching on the necessity of the Catholic Faith, of baptism, and of inclusion in the Catholic Church for salvation refutes, not only a) proponents of the laxism and indifferentism of the Vatican II "church" (from Francis on down), but also ) many well-meaning but miseducated would-be defenders of those dogmas in our day who err in the opposite direction by innovating and going far beyond what the Church has authoritatively taught on those issues in all her relevant documents -- not only in her extraordinary pronouncements but also in those of the ordinary magisterium (e.g., Rome-approved catechisms, the annotations in approved Catholic Bibles, the common teaching of canonized Doctors of the Church -- such as St. Robert Bellarmine himself -- and approved theologians, etc.), which cannot and do not contradict what is taught by the extraordinary magisterium.

May 14: The feast of St. Matthias, whose election called for by St. Peter in Acts 1 showcases the right way to go about obtaining clergy for the Church, versus the wrong way taken by the "traditionalists" in our day. (There is a profoundly pertinent passage in the four-volume original edition of Fr. Butler's LIves of the Saints that is relevant, and which I quote, in my essay on this post-Vatican II scandal.)

May 30: The feast of St. Joan of Arc, whose intercession and intervention is urgently needed to end the current crisis (as I've explained in my CD about her, which people have kindly praised and which is still available from our online store), since the erroneous "Nouvelle Théologie" (which, though previously condemned by the Church's magisterium, prevailed at Vatican II and caused the current crisis) emanated from her beloved France, from which quarter will also come (in part) the resolution of the same crisis.

June 29: The feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, whose illuminating conflict at Antioch (recorded in Galatians 2) is fatally misinterpreted by both liberal and conservative would-be explicators of our current woes, as explained in the essay I wrote on that day.

July 4: The feast of Commemoration of All Holy Popes, on which occasion I laid out numerous and incontrovertible examples of the vast difference between the teaching of all the true popes of the past and the heresies of the post-Vatican II pseudo-popes. For good measure, since the Fourth of July is also "Independence Day" in the USA, I explained why the “liberty” that apostate America celebrates on this day (like the “liberty,” religious and otherwise, praised by the Vatican II “church”) is a far cry from the true liberty offered by Our Lord Jesus Christ in John 8:31.

The above list is by no means exhaustive, as there were numerous other days on which I set out to write what I hoped would be my farewell essay on this old website as well as the inaugural essay on the occasion of the launch of my new site, only to be stymied by an obstacle of one nature or another.

 

Additional examples of abortive attempts to update the old site would include July 9, the feast of Sts. John Fisher and Thomas More, martyrs from the enormously instructive parallel period of the English "Reformation;" August 1, the feast of the Seven Holy Maccabees: the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, like the book of Daniel, predict by prophecy and type the removal of the true Mass from the formerly Catholic churches in our day and (by and large) from the earth itself; August 25, the feast of St. Louis IX of France, whose entire life and reign faithfully embodied the Church's constant teaching on the social kingship of Christ, a teaching blasphemously betrayed at Vatican II but which we still steadfastly champion and maintain here at BFI; September 2, the feast of St. Stephen I of Hungary, Louis IX's eleventh-century Eastern European counterpart and another of our key patrons, as the Matatics Catholic ancestors hailed from Hungary; September 3, the feast of the great St. Pius X, the scourge of modernism and the last canonized pope (whatever apostate Rome will soon attempt to claim to the contrary); September 19, the feast of Our Lady of LaSalette, who predicted that in these last days "Rome itself will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist ... [and thus] the [true] Church will be in eclipse" (see our 6-CD set on "Counterfeit Catholicism for more on this prophecy and its evident fulfillment on our day); September 26, the feast of the glorious North American Martyrs (St. Isaac Jogues, St. Jean de Brébeuf, et al), who never died for such paganism-praising nonsense as uttered and spluttered by "Pope" Francis and his post-Vatican II predecessors; and September 30, the feast day of our great patron St. Jerome, patron of Biblical studies and defender of Biblical inerrancy, who is no doubt justly outraged by what passes for "conservative Catholic Biblical scholarship" in our day, a scholarship which in fact embraces or tolerates positions questioning the traditional authorship and/or historicity of Biblical books, positions categorically condemned by the magisterium in the past but ignored in the post-Vatican II milieu as "no longer binding." (That pre-Vatican II strictures on Scripture scholars are "no longer binding" was declared by antipope Paul VI, which of course renders it irrelevant.)  

The good news is that, though my former webmaster is, sadly, no longer professionally available to me, I have procured the help of a local WordPress website designer with whose assistance I will finally be able to present my new site to the world later this week. From the postings I've already made to the new site, I know that I will encounter none of the problems that have plagued and hampered the periodic updating of the old site.

 

The new site (which actually is already up and running but whose debut has not yet been officially announced or publicly unveiled) will not only offer multimedia resources this existing site could not -- such as YouTube video lectures by me and digital downloads of my talks -- but also daily blogging by me, alternating in such diverse disciplines as Sacred Scripture (including a methodical study, chapter-by-chapter, of the entire Bible), Church history, apologetics, systematic theology, Catholic teaching on politics and economics, a Catholic perspective on literature and film, and much, much more.

So why am I moving heaven and earth today to post this, my next-to-last essay on this old site? (My next essay, which will be the last to appear on this old site, will be posted in a few days, announcing the launch of the new site; this new site will be temporarily located elsewhere on the Web until the old site is "drained" of its various archived articles and other data and these are transferred to the new site.)

 

I write today, rather than simply wait for the new site's launch in a few days, because I think it imprudent to wait even one more day to announce that, at long last, I will be delivering, later this month (October 26, to be precise) in Boston, and next month in New Jersey and New York City, a talk I have been wanting to take on the road for several months now -- in fact ever since the invalid election of antipope Francis. (October 13, the day of Our Lady's final apparition at Fatima, will mark seven months that this man has unlawfully occupied the see of St. Peter since his invalid election on March 13.)

Folks, nothing is more basic to the Catholic Faith than the solemn declaration of Our Lord Jesus Christ recorded in the Gospel of St. John 14:6: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no one comes to the Father but through Me."

Anyone who doesn't actually believe what Christ said on that occasion -- anyone who doesn't believe what Christ clearly and authoritatively taught about the necessity of coming to God through Him -- cannot credibly claim to be a Christian.

Christ's apostles all taught this truth with equally uncompromising clarity and conviction. Thus St. Peter, the first pope, courageously told the hostile Jewish ruling council (the Sanhedrin), "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other Name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). 

Anyone who doesn't proclaim what St. Peter proclaimed on that occasion about the necessity of faith in Jesus Christ cannot credibly claim to be a successor to St. Peter.

Jorge Bergoglio, aka "Pope Francis," claims to be a validly elected pope, and thus the Vicar of Christ and the successor of St. Peter. And the vast majority of people on earth who call themselves Catholics blithely regard him as such -- even so-called conservatives, and even the vast majority of "traditionalist" Catholics.

And yet it seems that not a week can go by without Francis audaciously denying what Christ Himself taught in John 14:6 and what Christ's first vicar on earth, St. Peter, taught in Acts 4:12 about the necessity of embracing the Christian Faith and of belonging to the Christian Church if one hopes to get to heaven.

In remarks made in interviews and other public statements during the past several days, Francis has once again confused, bamboozled, and scandalized the world by denying the Church's dogmatically defined teaching about the necessity of Christian Faith and the necessity of belonging to the Church, by stating that even atheists who live and die without becoming believers in Christ can get to heaven -- as can Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other adherents of every imaginable variety of religion on earth, however objectively blasphemous the teaching of those religions about God, Christ, etc.

Why does Francis preach this message? And how does his very deliberate propagation of this heresy promote the New World Order's humanistic push for a one world economy, a one world government, and a one world, all-inclusive religion?

God willing, on Saturday, October 26 I will be driving the five hours from my home in Scranton, Pennsylvania up to the Boston area to give a talk that evening at 7 pm entitled "Francis and the New World Order: How Today's Counterfeit Catholicism Promotes the Agenda of Antichrist."

The talk with be given at the Hyatt Place Boston/Braintree, 50 Forbes Rd, Braintree MA 02184. The Hyatt is a local landmark: a castle-shaped hotel (formerly a Sheraton) familiar to area residents, located directly across from the South Shore Plaza Mall. Simply take exit 6 (the Rt 37 exit) off I-93 just south of Boston, turn right, and you'll see the hotel on your right.

At the beginning of this month I mailed out nearly 200 fliers providing full details of this event to everyone on my mailing list who lives within an hour's drive of Boston. I also emailed a PDF version of the flier to everyone on my list who lived near Boston and for whom I had an email address.

Though you may not live in the Boston area, you may have family or friends who do. If so, I urge you to urge them to attend this important and eye-opening talk. If for this or any other reason you would like to receive a printed copy of this flier, or receive by email a PDF version of the flier, just email me (gerrymatatics@gerrymatatics.org), and I will gladly mail you or email you the flier the same day that I receive your request.

Please note that, due to limited seating, people wishing to attend this talk MUST PRE-REGISTER by either emailing me or calling me at (570) 969-1724 and providing me with their name, phone number, and the number of people in their party wishing to attend. Seats are filling up fast, so I would suggest contacting me immediately; I would hate to have to turn anyone away at the door.

If this trip to Boston is even a slight success (i.e., if I don't return home hundreds of dollars poorer than when I left, as generally happens these days!), I plan to give the same talk next month (November) in a few locations in New Jersey as well as in all five boroughs of New York City and on Long Island.

 

By God's grace to this undeserving nobody I've been privileged to deliver over 2000 different talks on various aspects of the Catholic Faith in over 400 cities and towns across the country and around the world since I started Biblical Foundations International 22 years ago, logging over 2 million miles of travel in the process.

 

It's been a long haul, but my energy for evangelizing remains undiminished, and I would dearly love to fly to key cities throughout the country -- Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, Dallas, St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago, Columbus, Atlanta, Washington DC -- to give this same talk to as many people as possible face-to-face.

 

But, tragically, BFI's income (which is my only source of income) is at an all-time low, and not even keeping pace with expenses, with the result that I am sliding more deeply into debt every month. This threatens to make necessary the immediate closure of Biblical Foundations International and my taking up another career in order to feed my family of 11. As a result, all I can afford at this point is to drive to an adjacent state like NJ -- and adjacent to it, NYC -- to give this talk.

A number of years ago I appealed to folks to help me by starting a "50/50 Club," which envisioned 50 people (an average of one person per state) who would be willing to donate a mere $50 a month (less than $1.67 a day) to enable me to continue this work of evangelism and apologetics full-time. This struck me as a modest, attainable goal.

 

Had that dream come anywhere near to being realized, the resultant $2500 a month income (50 donors x $50 each) would have amounted to a modest $30,000 a year "salary" -- not a heck of a lot to support a growing family of 11 with (in fact, still well under the government-defined "poverty level," which is where we're used to living), but adequate for a family willing to make many sacrifices, a family who lives frugally, and increasingly shops at Salvation Army and Goodwill stores when even Wal-Mart is sometimes beyond our means.

 

(By contrast, consider the president of another Catholic apologetics organization, who pays himself a quarter of a million dollars annually, and has only one child -- who's been a full-grown adult for years. This man makes over 10 times what I make, yet gives less than one tenth as many talks as I give each year.)

Well, we never received even half the amount of responses needed to ensure even that modest level of funding. (We peaked, I recall, at 23 such monthly donors.) But even that number of donors, which we haven't seen for years, has now dwindled to less than a dozen donors who faithfully send us a little something every month to keep Biblical Foundations International going. If we hadn't been able to make a little additional money once in a while by selling off our possessions on e-Bay, we would have starved long ago, humanly speaking.

I am always incredibly, incredibly busy, with more projects, talks, and trips underway than you can possibly imagine. But these past six months I have been unusually, unprecedentedly busy, with hardly any time to rest or catch up on urgent matters crying for my attention, including returning many people's non-urgent phone calls and replying to their emails.

Over the past six months I have taken many trips and given many talks that I haven't even been able to advertise on my website. To cite but one example, (as already mentioned) I traveled to Texas in July for a weekend-long debate against a well-known anti-Catholic fundamentalist. (I am still patiently waiting to receive the recording of that debate.)

In addition, every month I spend over a hundred hours reading and researching for my ongoing "Plot Against the Church" series of interviews -- now in its eighth year! -- which appears on the "In the Spirit of Chartres" website (www.isoc.ws) and which then periodically gets released by me -- once eight new episodes have been recorded -- in 8-CD album installments. No one remunerates me for this expenditure of time and effort (although once a grateful listener kindly offered to send me, as often as he could afford to, an occasional $50 monthly donation to help fund this ongoing educational effort; I received one such check from that person -- and possibly a second, a long time later -- but this kindly soul never did so again, and thus joined the ranks of so many others who have initially offered or promised support but usually fail to follow through).

Furthermore, every week I receive phone calls -- including late at night and on weekends -- from people all around the world who are in crisis -- personal, familial, spiritual -- and seeking advice, or just someone to talk to in their deep distress. In addition to the time spent listening to and helping them, I often mail out free CDs, books, or other materials to people who can't afford to purchase them.

 

On top of these regular responsibilities, an enormous project of the past few months -- involving hundreds and hundreds of weary and lonely man-hours of labor and the purchasing and lugging of thousands of feet of lumber and thousands of bricks -- has been the complete rebuilding, rearranging, reorganizing, and dramatic expansion of the St. Jerome Study Center (as you'll see from a video tour of the Center on the new website). This was of course necessitated by the aforementioned collapse of a portion of the Center back on April 8.

 

As a result the St. Jerome Study Center, now in its ninth year, is once again "open for business" to any who care to come study with me -- for a day, a weekend, a week, or even longer -- any subjects they wish to dig more deeply into among one or more of the following fields: Biblical studies, classical languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin), Church history, philosophy, theology, apologetics, liturgy, canon law, politics, economics, literature, and other related disciplines.

In short, my disastrous lack of income over the past six months (not to mention the last several years!) has not slowed down my pace one whit, nor has it deterred me from continuing my many projects and even undertaking many new ones (like the new website), though it has made it much, much harder to do all these things -- painfully so. 

I hope and pray that at least some of you reading these words see the value of what I do, by God's grace. I live this way because, frankly, I see litle value in doing anything else (speaking only for myself). Having an expensive hobby or taking an expensive vacation, eating at a fancy restaurant or having a fancy car or house, being able to afford fancy clothes, wear a fancy watch, or have this or that -- none of that appeals to me, or ever has. I only want to get myself and my loved ones, and as many people as possible, to heaven, and with that I am more than satisfied.

If you are already one of the tiny handful -- less than a dozen -- who regularly send me a little something, or if you have already sent a significant donation to Biblical Foundations International earlier this year, I wouldn't dream of asking for anything additional from you. Know that you have my undying gratitude for what you've already done, and that you and your loved ones, both living and deceased, remain in my and my family's daily rosaries and other prayers.

If, however, you have never made a donation to Biblical Foundations International -- or if it's been a while (say, many months) since you have done so -- would you please consider sending a donation, of whatever size you can afford, to enable me to keep doing what I can, by God's grace, to reach as many people as possible with the truth?

My new cutting-edge, multimedia website has already cost me nearly $500 to design. (I have a bill in that amount from a website designer due October 10.) And to continue and even expand our impact incurs ongoing expenses, as always: every month we have a phone bill to pay, stamps to purchase (to mail out fliers, catalogs, etc.), ink and paper to purchase for the printer and the photocopier, the monthly fees for the server that hosts our website, gas to put in the car to enable me to leave on my speaking trips, hotel meeting space to rent in which to give the talks, advertising costs (such as the $150 ad I placed in the October 14 issue of the American Free Press advertising my upcoming October 26 Boston talk), etc. etc.

As always, the fastest and easiest way to donate is to go to any page here on my website (www.gerrymatatics.org) and click on the orange-colored button labeled "Make A Donation" located in the upper right-hand area of the page. (My new website, which is already up and running but will be officially unveiled in a few days, has the same sort of button on each of its pages as well.) This enables you to use PayPal to make a quick and secure donation.

If you prefer, you can call me at (570) 969-1724 and leave on my voicemail your MasterCard, Visa, or Discover Card's 16-digit number, expiration date, 3-digit security code from the back of the card, your name exactly as it appears on the card (including any middle initial), your credit card's billing address, and the amount you wish to donate. Please leave a phone number so that I might call if any part of your message is unclear or unintentionally incomplete.

A third option is to mail a check or money order to: Gerry Matatics, PO Box 569, Dunmore PA 18512. Please make the check payable to either "Gerry Matatics" or "Biblical Foundations International."

I truly hate making appeals for funds, which is why I haven't done so for over half a year now. But the result of not doing so, sadly, has been a catastrophic drop in donations that cannot continue without forcing me to close down this lay apostolate altogether and seek another means of income.

If everyone reading these words who has ever given, even just once, to Biblical Foundations International, would be willing to donate $100 at this time, we could instantly reduce our debt sufficiently to surge forward with all our projects intact and in fact flourishing.

 

However, I know that many of our past donors, alas, will not give at all, so I'm hoping that some of you will be inspired to give more than $100 to make up for those who won't, or would like to but can't.

 

And if you believe in what we're doing but can't give as much as $100 at this time, please know that whatever you can give -- even the equivalent of the widow's mite (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4) -- is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for helping me to spread the truth about fraudulent Francis and his counterfeit Catholicism, and to humbly and lovingly invite people to embrace the truth that God has generously revealed to the human race through the incarnation, preaching, life, death, and resurrection of His Son -- the authentic, classic Catholic Faith perennially proclaimed by the one true Church established by that same Son -- so that they can avoid the everlasting loss of their souls our loving Lord warned us we will experience if we do not allow God to unite us to Christ and to His Church before we die.

I truly believe that at my judgment and yours we will wish we had done far, far more to make the salvation of many more souls possible, and that we will regret the many things we have misspent our time and money on instead, to no purpose and to our everlasting shame.

I hope all is well with you and your loved ones. May Our merciful Lord grant you and yours His wisdom and grace to navigate these dark days of diabolical deception predicted in Sacred Scripture (e.g., 2 Thessalonians 2:10-11) -- days that should nevertheless fill us with joy and hope and peace as we eagerly await the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ in glory to consummate His Church and usher in the eternal state of His everlasting kingdom. 

Yours for the completion of Christ's Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) in our time,

Gerry Matatics