Rorate Caeli

The Church triumphs over Luther

Cast out by Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, the Devil, false religion, and the heresiarch Martin Luther fall from heaven while an angel of God burns Luther's heretical writings and mistranslated German Bible -- from the fresco that Johann Michael Rottmayr (1656 –1730) painted within the dome of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI's Karlskirche in Vienna, Austria.

While the Vatican officially celebrates heresy, schism, blasphemy, sacrilege and iconoclasm [that is to say, Protestantism], let faithful Catholics instead join with the saints and angels in celebrating the Church's eternal triumph over Protestantism's assaults on the Faith which she achieved through Leo X's bull Exsurge Domine and the decrees of the Council of Trent, which infallibly and irreformably anathematise the false teachings of the Protestants.
Let us renew our fervent prayers for the clerics and lay persons who have fallen under Leo's rebuke and Trent's anathemas.

Let us pray also for heretics and schismatics, that our God and Lord would deliver them from all their errors, and vouchsafe to recall them to our holy Mother the Catholic and Apostolic Church:

O almighty and eternal God, who savest all, and willest not that anyone should perish, look down on the souls of those deceived by the wiles of the devil, that the evil of heresy being removed from their hearts, the erring may repent and return to the unity of Thy truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who livest and reignest with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

-- Solemn prayer for heretics and schismatics, from the ancient Good Friday liturgy of the traditional Roman Rite

O God, who dost correct what has gone astray and gatherest together what is scattered, and keepest what Thou hast gathered together, we beseech Thee in Thy mercy to pour down upon Christian people the grace of union with Thee, that putting aside disunion and attaching themselves to the true shepherd of Thy Church, they may be able to render Thee due service. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who livest and reignest with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

-- Collect from the ancient Votive Mass for the Removal of Schism