Last year I wrote an article titled, Why Do Rad-Trads Keep “Guessing” Everything Right? In it, I explained it was not a coincidence that traditional Catholics were accurate on everything from resisting “the covid vaccine” to seeing the current Church crisis accurately.  Why is this? It wasn’t because my Google-button worked better than the priests that were ordained before me.  It wasn’t because I wanted to save lives by avoiding an mRNA gene therapy injection while other more lukewarm Catholics wanted their loved-ones to die.  The reason was not physical.  Rather, it was spiritual.  We all might have good-wills, but we were informed by different beings.

If Rad-Trads Guessing was a “told-ya-so” article, this article is written so as to give insight on Discernment Rules influencing Secular Decisions going forward. As Michael Knowles repeatedly says (quoting Cardinal Manning, I believe) it is true that “all politics are downstream of theology.” This means everyone worships something and it fills their hearts and minds. If you worship the true and living God as found in Divine Revelation, your practical decisions are going to be informed by the Holy Spirit. If you worship a different god—whether that be as dark as Mohammed’s Allah, or seemingly less bad, such as whatever “god” inspires “modernist Catholicism” then the fact is that such spirits will lead you to not only eternal unhappiness, but even temporal unhappiness.

Let’s parse out the Rules for Discernment of Spirits #314-315 from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, where his words will be in italics, and mine will be in orange bold:

St. Ignatius: In the case of those who go from one mortal sin to another, the enemy is ordinarily accustomed to propose apparent pleasures. He fills their imagination with sensual delights and gratifications, the more readily to keep them in their vices and increase the number of their sins. With such persons the good spirit uses a method which is the reverse of the above. Making use of the light of reason, he will rouse the sting of conscience and fill them with remorse.

Me: Those living in serious sin are always going to make the wrong decisions, including everything about modesty to medicine to now even mutilating surgeries of their own children.   This is not because they want to be evil people, but rather because they are informed by demons because they don’t trust Christ in matters of faith or the traditional Magisterium on matters of morals.  For those in mortal sin, every additional mortal sin will make them feel better, at least until hitting rock-bottom. St. Ignatius knew this because he lived such a life of sin before his conversion.

St. Ignatius: In the case of those who go on earnestly striving to cleanse their souls from sin and who seek to rise in the service of God our Lord to greater perfection, the method pursued is the opposite of that mentioned in the first rule.

Me: Those living in sanctifying grace are going to make the opposite decision of those living in sin in nearly everything they do:  Who they vote for, which medicines they take, the level of resistance they show to modernists trying to command them to “obedience.”  This is because angels are informing those in grace, not popularity-contests.  That is not to say that you do not have free will.  But it is to say that the right decision will usually bring you immediate consolation.

St. Ignatius:  Then it is characteristic of the evil spirit to harass with anxiety, to afflict with sadness, to raise obstacles backed by fallacious reasonings that disturb the soul. Thus he seeks to prevent the soul from advancing. It is characteristic of the good spirit, however, to give courage and strength, consolations, tears, inspirations, and peace. This He does by making all easy, by removing all obstacles so that the soul goes forward in doing good.

Me: This means that if you are living in sanctifying grace (baptized and with all mortal sins confessed and despised) and doing your best to be an orthodox Catholic (notice I didn’t say “perfect”) and if you live and worship and learn in a manner reflective of how all the old-school saints lived and worshiped and taught, then angels will encourage you with courage and strength.  This will be a “gut-instinct” Catholicism.  Thus, the entire key to making good secular decisions is to be as holy and as orthodox as possible.  Nothing made this more clear than who got the Covid-19 “vaccine” right about four years ago. Also, notice that those on the left-side of Church and State issues over the last decade have used fear for everything:  Fear of death, fear of being disobedient to a certain man in Rome, fear of going against the opinion polls.  But those on the right side of Catholicism have come to know (especially in the last decade) that “it is for freedom that Christ has set you free.”—Gal 5:1.

Not to use fear after all that, but if you keep finding yourself making the wrong decisions, maybe you have unconfessed sin in your life.  It might be good to review my list, 15 Mortal Sins Catholics Are Missing in Their Confessions.

One last thing:  Yesterday, I listened to a three-hour podcast where ex-SEAL Shawn Ryan had on his show Tucker Carlson.  Although they used the F-word way too much,  Shawn and Tucker both agreed towards the end that our country is approaching a pre-apocalyptic showdown where the country will not be divided between Republicans and Democrats, but rather between Bible-reading Christians and Satanists.  I totally agree with them.  Towards the end, Tucker Carlson amazingly admitted that all the most serious Christians in his life are Catholics.  Shawn Ryan was a bit more cynical based on the confusion in the Vatican.  In any case, even though Tucker Carlson is not Catholic, at the beginning of the show, he got to the heart of my article here on Discernment Rules on Secular Decisions by showing that nearly everything boils down to gut-instinct if you’re following God: