Dictatorship Imminent
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” – Aldous Huxley
A remarkable portrait of our contemporary world appeared two months ago with the daunting title : “Decline, Decay, Denial, Delusion and Despair”, but the content is surely true to life. Starting from a street scene to be found no doubt all over the eastern United States, the author concludes that within 15 years an Orwellian dictatorship will descend upon his country as the unwanted effect of wanted causes. But the USA is not typical of the whole world ? The whole world is buying into the American way of life. “Let the buyer beware”!
This autumn in the streets of Wildwood, New Jersey, the author observed pavements encumbered with a host of heavily overweight men and women under 50 years of age rolling around town on government-subsidized mobility scooters to visit one fast-food joint after another in order to gorge on sugar-laden goodies which would give their latest model scooters more work than ever. His amusing name for them ? – “The weight-challenged disabled on their powered mobility enhancement vehicles.” Such is the flight from reality of “political correctness” and its language.
The author seeks causes for this tragic-comic effect : how can the American people that once saved 12% of their income have been persuaded to frighten the obesity statistics off the end of the charts with a debt-laden, sugar-sodden way of life, with no more savings for themselves and with an unbearable burden of debt being bequeathed to their children and grand-children ? Of course there is a lack of self-control on their part, he says, but there must be something more sinister, some mind behind such a mindless scene. He says the mass of citizens are being manipulated by an invisible government that has mastered the modern techniques of mass manipulation.
He quotes a pioneer of these masters from the 1920’s, Edward Bernays: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses is an important element in democratic society… Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society… Whether in politics, business, social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.” They are “the true ruling power of the country,” and they “pull the wires which control the public mind.” For what purpose ? For their own wealth and power.
It is they who have organized today’s financial and economic crisis for their own benefit. They have “wrecked the world economy… shifted their worthless debt onto the backs of taxpayers and unborn generations, thrown senior citizens and savers under the bus by stealing $400 billion per year of interest from them, and enriched themselves with bubble-level profits and bonus payments.” And when the plug has to be pulled on this unsustainable way of life, then our invisible masters have prepared for us a 1984 “dictatorship of tears” with militarized police with millions of bullets, surveillance cameras and drones everywhere, imprisonment without charges and so on and so on. Yet, says the author, it is the citizens’ own fault who have preferred ignorance to truth, sickness to health, media lies to critical thinking, security to liberty.
There is only one thing lacking to this admirable analysis: could our governing elite have run so wild, or our masses have turned so dumb, if either had retained the least sense of a God who judges us all at death, according to Ten Commandments ? Of course not. Catholics, wake up !
Kyrie eleison. Bishop Richard Williamson
Materialism, Calvinism and The Greed of The West
Well the Season of Greed and Avarice is upon us.
Why has the celebration of the birth of Christ been adulterated to such an extent that we act as if we are deserving of so much more on His Birthday than he had?
Christ “so loved poverty that He chose for His mother not a rich and powerful queen, but a poor and humble Virgin. He willed to be born, not in a palace, but in a bleak stable, the manger of which, covered with a little straw, was His only couch.” – The Sinner’s Guide, Venerable Louis of Granada.
Where did it all go wrong? The West’s wealth and love of money is unprecedented historically. We are told that capitalism is the best economic system but what happens when capitalism is devoid of morality and a sense of responsibility to our children and our future?
Personal greed and corporate greed have transformed capitalism. Corporate America panders to our base nature. It seeks out the latest, coolest, hippest and ultimately the lowest elements of our culture, repackages them, and seduces our senses, our children, and our pocketbooks.
The “hipsters” behind the scenes of what’s cool push the envelope on every front. They turn their decadent, sex-obsessed minds on our children and assume them to be of like ilk. They assume the average male is a vulgar, adolescent, frat-boy, who delights in toilet-humor, sex jokes and freaky stunts. They imagine the average female to be a shop-a-holic, vain, sex-kitten, who longs to throw off the confining chains of parents, husband and or children. The imagined male and female become reality when they are fed constant rebellion, entertainment, and not only sex, but “taboo” sex.
We exalt in arising at 4:30 a.m. on the biggest shopping day of the year to acquire, accumulate and acquiesce to this culture. The corporations that exploit Christmas also exploit our thirst for human respect. After all, if we opt out of the spending and gift-giving mania, we are uncharitable scrooges and our friends and family may think we have become religious fanatics. When we could use the season to counter the culture’s notion of Christ, we instead capitulate.
Why this obsession with the temporal? Where has our sense of the holy and eternal gone? Hillaire Belloc said of John Calvin and Calvinism, “In denying the efficacy of good deeds and of the human will, and abnegations, in leaving on one side as useless all the doctrine and tradition of Holy Poverty, Calvin opened the door to the domination of the mind by money. St Thomas had said it centuries before–that if men abandoned the idea of God as the supreme good they would tend to replace Him…[with]…material wealth” as the supreme good.” -Hillaire Belloc, The Crisis of Civilization.
If Calvin was right and our good deeds have no effect on our salvation, and, furthermore that we are predestined by the Divine Will to such an extent that man’s free will is nullified, then one can see how man could easily be consumed by temporal matters, and conversely ignore matters of the eternal. Why be so foolish as to forego the world’s glitter and glamour if there is no eternal consequence to partaking in it?
“Man cannot freely rise to God and the contemplation of His beauty while he is breathless in pursuit of riches. A heart filled with material and earthly pleasures can never know spiritual and divine joys. No it is impossible to unite what is false with what is true; what is spiritual with what is carnal; what is temporal with what is eternal; they can never dwell together in one heart.” -The Sinner’s Guide, Venerable Louis of Granada.
Likewise man cannot truly appreciate the gravity of Christ’s birth when we engage in the world’s notion of Christmas which amounts to idolatry and worship of the golden calf. God requires good deeds of His people and our actions will have consequences. We must not partake in the corruption of Christ’s birthday.
“Riches are acquired only at the expense of pain and labor; they are preserved only by care and anxiety; and they are never lost without bitter vexation and grief. But worse than this, they are rarely accumulated without offence against God…”. -The Sinner’s Guide, Venerable Louis of Granada.
http://www.realclearreligion.com/materialism_calvinism_the_g.html
President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Thanksgiving
1863 was one of the most dramatic years in American history. On January 1 of that year, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued, declaring that persons held in any territory or state in armed insurrection against the United States would be forever free. July 1-3, 1863 saw the bloodiest battle in America’s history, Gettysburg, with deaths ranging upwards of 46,000 to as much as 51,000 troops from the two sides. November 19, 1863 was the scene of the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, including Lincolns’ famous Gettysburg Address.
Sometimes lost in the historic events of that year is another of Lincoln’s proclamations, this one being his Thanksgiving Proclamation. It is of course true that days of Thanksgiving had long been celebrated in America, beginning with the “first Thanksgiving” celebrated by the Pilgrims in 1621. George Washington issued his own Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789 at the end of the long and difficult Revolutionary War.
Since 1861, of course, there had been a terrifying and brutal Civil War fought between the United States and the Confederacy with thousands upon thousands of deaths and a horrifying number of soldiers injured or lost to disease. 1863 at long last saw the tide begin to turn in favor of the Union, climaxing with the Battle of Gettysburg and the Union victory at Vicksburg. There were dark days ahead to be sure, but it was looking more and more like the Union would see final victory.
At the suggestion of a national magazine editor, Lincoln on October 3, 1863 issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation, for the first time setting aside the last Thursday in November as a National Day for giving thanks.
The year that is drawing towards its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to invite and provoke the aggressions of foreign States, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
The needful diversions of wealth and strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship. The axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battlefield; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people; I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer to our beneficent Father, who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to him that, for such singular deliverances and blessings; they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
Abraham Lincoln.
http://abrahamlincolnblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/lincolns-thanksgiving-proclamation-1863.html
Pilgrims, Socialism and Thanksgiving
The Pilgrim trip was funded by a group of investors who were hoping to get a return on their money. The Pilgrims were therefore contractually bound to the investor’s plan. That plan stated that the Pilgrims were to hold all things in common and equally share from the proceeds of their labor (socialism).
The early settlers of Jamestown were under the same kind of contract. I heard a great lecture from John Rolfe (okay, it was actually someone dressed up as John Rolfe) who explained it this way:
Basically, when one works hard all day and another simply strolls the grounds and puffs on his pipe, and yet they both get the same amount of food for dinner, eventually the one who works hard decides that tomorrow he will do his own strolling and puffing.
Because of this, the Jamestown settlers were starving. It was only when they apportioned private property and ate the fruit of their own labor that the colony began to thrive.
This was the same story in Plymouth not too many years later. Their leader, William Bradford, wrote of how they had to abandon the investor’s plan in order to survive, for when work and non-work both get the same reward, eventually no one will work.
Isn’t it interesting how we often times fail to learn the lessons from the past.
Socialism experiments continue today, with the same kind of results. They never really succeed.
Why do we continue to try them? For several reasons.
One, the state has a vested interest in this happening. It is the big winner in socialism. It garners great power. So, when the state grows to the point that it can force the people to increasingly give up their rights to private property and fool the others to think that they will be better off sharing equally from the corn crib, guess where the power shifts…to the officials of the state.
Two, we misunderstand the nature of man. We have bought the Maslow lie that man is basically good. If he is good, then he will obviously love to work hard and go to years and years of medical school and specialized training so that he can work 14 hour days and get one ear of corn out of the crib while his friend follows his heart to stroll and puff. And because we are all such inherently good people, after dinner we will sit around the campfire and sing kum bay ya.
Third, we misunderstand the nature of work. We believe there is something cruel and oppressive about work and so we want someone (the state) to come up with a way to allow us not to work, yet circumvent the consequences of non-work. Or, we believe that the solution to someone not working is to give them another ear of corn.
However, the reality is this:
–The state may think that socialism will satisfy its lust for power, but, in the end, it will eventually collapse under a mountain of debt or a corn crib filled with IOUs. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “socialism works until you run out of other people’s money.” Eventually, the colony begins to starve.
–Man will not enjoy working his tail off so that someone else who is not working can reap the fruit of his labor. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that they were establishing a government that had balances of powers because men were NOT angels.
–Work is not oppressive and cruel, but it is exactly what the poor need…not only to be able to produce their own corn, but because we were made by the Original Worker to work. We are happier and healthier when we do.
The Scriptures connect the dots for us regarding work and laziness. Here are a few: Proverbs 10:4, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” Proverbs 14:23, “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.”
In other words, we reap what we sow.
In socialism, we try to reverse those consequences. Reward the lazy, punish the diligent.
You sow, I reap.
That eventually fails.
One solution is found in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat”. This is a statement that many would view as cruel, but it is actually compassionate…for both the man himself and for the colony as a whole. Hunger is a great motivator to work and therefore produce.
When the Pilgrims returned to a biblical view and threw off the yoke of socialistic bindings, they began to prosper. And when they prospered, they held a day of Thanksgiving.
It saddens me that our nation is slipping so quickly back into this yoke. Though we have the lessons from our past and the lessons from failed experiments all around us, we seem to be asleep or in a fog.
Maybe around your Thanksgiving table this year, you can recount the lessons learned to your children so that they will not be doomed to repeat the failures of the past. Put on a Pilgrim hat or your John Rolfe outfit and tell them the story with great gusto as I heard it in Jamestown.
http://deltackett.com/2010/10/29/pilgrims-socialism-and-thanksgiving/
Ann Barnhardt: On Loaves, Fishes, Math and Marxist Tyranny
There is a boy here that hath five barley loaves and two fishes. But what are these among so many?
Then Jesus said: Make the men sit down. Now, there was much grass in the place. The men therefore sat down, in number about five thousand.
And Jesus took the loaves: and when he had given thanks, he distributed to them that were set down. In like manner also of the fishes, as much as they would.
And when they were filled, he said to his disciples: gather up the fragments that remain, lest they be lost.
They gathered up therefore and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves which remained over and above to them that had eaten.
Now those men, when they had seen what a miracle Jesus had done, said: This is of a truth the prophet that is to come into the world. – Jn:6: 9-14
A very good question regarding something I said in part 7 of the economic presentation, beginning at 16:15:
How do you reconcile your statement that anything regarding charity to the poor not grounded in mathematics is satanic in light of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes?
An excellent question. And I have an excellent answer.
First, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is contained in all four gospels: Matthew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9, and John 6. John is very specific in terms of the source quantities, stating that Jesus fed 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. As people took from the baskets the quantity inside the baskets never diminished. This was a miracle, plain and simple.
A fun aside for any physics buffs is to debate whether or not God observed the law of Conservation of Mass in this miracle. Did He synthesize entirely new mass in order to continually replenish the baskets, or did he “harvest” mass from elsewhere in the universe? OR did he transform energy into matter per Einstein’s theory of Relativity?
Miracles are actions that God takes that break the natural law in order to make manifest His power and love. Miracles are God’s way of reminding us that He is God, that the universe and everything in it is His, and that WE ARE NOT GOD and would do well to never, ever, ever forget it.
And that is PRECISELY the point. The Marxist-totalitarian milieu is making the claim that it too can “miraculously” break the natural laws of physics and mathematics and provide infinite quantites of physical goods and service commodities. In short, the state is claiming that it is God’s equal, that it can “feed the multitudes” with no respect to the natural law just as Christ did, and that it is thus to be worshiped as “god”.
Now mind you, the oligarchs know full well that they cannot deliver on these promises any more than they could actually feed 5000 people with five loaves and two fishes. They have no intention of delivering, and could not care any less about the people they are claiming to “help” with their promised “charity”. Their only intention is to use the lie of the promise of a miraculous distribution of goods and services in order attract and engender loyalty and worship from the masses, and then to seize total power when the masses are starving and cannot escape.
What is so sickening is that the Bishops and Cardinals of the Church are so thoroughly Marxist today due to the Communist-homosexualist infiltration begun after WWII, so breathtakingly stupid and contra-educated, and so heretical that they worship the state as “god” and view themselves as partners with satan in his lying promises of infinite amounts of free stuff from the government-god, and will do ANYTHING to maintain their earthly power, social status and their billion-dollar bond portfolios.
Only God is God. Only God can suspend the natural laws of mathematics and physics.
The State is not God. The State has no supernatural power whatsoever and is thus completely constrained by the laws of mathematics and physics. When the State claims otherwise, when the State claims and promises that it too can multiply the loaves and the fishes (if the masses will only bow down and worship the State first, of course), it is satanic and must be resisted and fought with every fiber of one’s being.
God always performs the miracle first, then invites us to worship Him, and delivers heaven.
Satan, through the State, demands the worship first, promising miracles as a reward for the worship, and then delivers nothing but hell.
Springtime in Pottersville
“Even so then, at this present time also, there is a remnant saved according to the election of grace” – Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (11:5)
I recently found myself standing before an old Catholic church and school building in the middle of New York. The abandoned structures were fairly typical of scores of churches and schools financed by immigrant dimes and nickels in the northeastern United States during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.
If I’d looked around a little more I probably would have been able to figure out which nearby building had once housed the convent in which the teaching nuns had lived. The impressive stone facade of the church, along with the red-brick school building, was obviously built to withstand the test of time. The immigrant Catholics who’d raised these towering steeples were certainly not rich. But they understood they were housing the Real Presence of our Lord, and thus sacrificed a great deal to make it happen.
Sadly, many of these Catholic complexes, built in urban neighborhoods, have long since been turned into apartments or community centers or simply shuttered. Those that remain open could be much needed oases of light in a desert of urban blight, but, alas, are locked most of the time, their campuses hauntingly silent.
I closed my eyes and imagined the energy and activity that once defined these places a hundred years ago: the children of immigrant Irish or Italians, dressed neatly in school uniforms, Baltimore Catechisms in hand, in the tow of young nuns in full habit or chasing after good-natured priests in cassocks. I can hear the children’s laughter and the bells ringing, and smell the incense lingering over the holy sacrifices offered daily. I can see and hear and feel the lives of my forefathers that once bustled in this now-dead place. These men actually made things in America. They used their hands and toiled for long hours, six days a week. Their wives made due with little, despite considerable hardship and suffering.
While our culture today points to the “Greatest Generation” as that comprised of good guys, loyal wives and wise-cracking World War II soldiers, I would humbly submit that the previous century’s immigrants who eked out a hardscrabble existence in a country that neither valued or appreciated them, raised large families in chronic poverty and persevered in building their faith— may well be more deserving of the accolade. The sacrifices they expended are literally carved into the brick and mortar of their churches and schools that still stand, if empty, today.
So, what went wrong?
In the century that separates us from the hope and optimism of the Christian people who laid the cornerstones for these buildings, something dreadful happened.
Like almost anyone born after the Second Vatican Council, I am a “convert” to Tradition. I was born in 1971, the high-water mark of optimism following the Council. The new Pentecost was in full bloom. No change was off-limits, even to that which had been previously considered unchangeable. The very foundations of Holy Mother Church shook from the tremors of novelty and transformation. The new theology was all the rage, even if it was boring, bland and modern. To see the physical manifestations of this theology, one need look no further than the churches built in the early 1970s. Even architecturally, the human element of the Church was running from everything that had come before.
Like almost all of my generation, I spent most of my life completely ignorant of the fact that traditional Catholicism existed. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we genuinely believed that the shadows of Catholic reality – existing in new and heretofore unrecognizable forms – were the real thing. We did not know that the priest used to face the altar during Mass, for example, or that the prayers were once offered in an ancient tongue. We never knew that priestly vestments were anything other than those polyester bed-sheets, or that Communion was distributed in any other manner but in the hand and to folks dressed in Led Zeppelin tee-shirts and ripped jeans.
The things that I now love so much about the Faith are the same things of which my generation had been kept utterly ignorant. We’d been robbed of our birthright and given a modernist mess of pottage in its place. Are we angry about that? You bet!
Even long after my re-version to the Catholic Faith, after years of reading the Church Fathers and the Lives of the Saints, I still did not know about the real thing. Re-version to the modern Church can be a confusing experience. I had read of great men and women of faith who were ready to sacrifice their lives for our Lord, but what I encountered in reality was modern Catholics who seemed to be going through the motions. My enthusiasm ran into the strong headwinds of aging hippie priests who told me the Church I was reading about didn’t exist anymore. My RCIA teacher informed me that “purgatory” is a doctrine on the way out and artificial birth control is not wrong so long as I didn’t believe it was wrong for me.
It was almost as if there was a conspiracy of silence by the vast majority of Catholics about how things used to be. The very meaning of what it meant to be Catholic had been radically altered, but nobody told us. It is only by the grace of God that a few of us managed to discover a whole new world of traditional Catholicism. When I first participated in the old Mass—when I first heard Gregorian Chant—I understood that this Catholicism of old – the constant and changeless Catholicism – was precisely what I’d been missing my whole life. I also understood why men and women from previous generations had suffered so much at the thought of losing it. I was grateful to God when I discovered that authentic Catholicism was being preserved by the spiritual equivalent of the survivors of a nuclear war. In the midst of an utterly broken and immoral society, men and women of good will were preserving the soul of the Catholic Faith.
So, there I was, standing before an example of the old Catholic church that can be found in any New York neighborhood, pockmarked by urban rot. I began visualizing what once was, while lamenting what has been so tragically lost. A thought occurred to me just then: Maybe we’re all living a nightmare. Maybe we will wake up tomorrow to see reality as it should be and as it once was. In our churches perhaps we’ll again see the ancient liturgy of our fathers offered in all its glory once again. Our schools will teem with wide-eyed children taught by faithful sisters. Convents and monasteries will again be filled with holy men and women storming the gates of heaven with their prayers and sacrifices for the world. Our bishops will fearlessly proclaim the unique salvific power of our Lord and his one true Church. They will educate Catholics and non-Catholics alike on the social kingship of our Lord and the Catholic vision of social order. Our seminaries will be filled with devout young men anxious to offer their lives for the greater glory of God. Orthodox Catholic colleges will educate young people in mind and soul in the greatest traditions of the Church’s intellectual life, and these young men and women will again become the seedbeds of a society based on faithful Catholic families and vocations.
Large families centered on faith will become the norm again as they always were – with mothers raising their little ones, fathers supporting them by hard work. The Church’s missionary work will be reignited as Protestantism continues to collapse, resulting in numerous adult baptisms again becoming a regular Easter occurrence. Our Church will again lead the way against divorce, abortion, obscenity and contraception.
Yes, I can see it: I can see a bright, vibrant society. It happened before; it could happen again. But first we must face the hard facts. We live in a world where every single measure of Catholic life is in abject decline. Instead of life, we see death. Instead of vibrancy, we see decay. Every day we’re made to witness the diabolic assault against our Lord’s holy priesthood that shakes Holy Mother Church to her very core. Bankrupt dioceses, shuttered schools, and empty seminaries tell the real story—it’s been a disastrous fifty years since the opening of the Second Vatican Council!
Standing before that venerable old church building, I was reminded of It’s a Wonderful Life. In that fabled film, George Bailey is provided the opportunity to see the value of his life through a vision of how the world would have been had he never been born. The homey town of Bedford Falls is thus transformed into the seedy, shameful Pottersville—a dark place much like the whole modern world today. The moral of the film is that the good we do in life, however seemingly insignificant, reverberates over time to change the world. The vision of a locked church and a padlocked school reminded me that we’re all living in a spiritual Pottersville, almost as if the Catholic Church had never been born.
It is hard to meet an intelligent, Mass-going Catholic today who still denies the Church is in crisis. Most recognize the decline but still refuse to lay blame at the feet of those who had the audacity to arrogate to themselves the power to change virtually every aspect of the Church’s identify in less than a generation. What took millennia to organically grow through rites and rituals and ideas and Tradition –while nurtured by the hands of saints – was deemed anachronistic by an imperious generation of churchmen who thought they knew better. In time, when the age of novelty is far passed, our descendants will no doubt marvel that these men got away with it.
But even today with the wreckage of Catholic life so evident, and a “cause and effect” of that wreckage so obvious, many good Catholics recoil at the notion that the changes brought about by the Council are the cause. They seem to miss the forest for the trees. Instead of an honest appraisal of the reality around them, they cling to the idea that if only the Council were implemented correctly things would get better; or if the new Mass were only celebrated reverently the liturgical crisis would end. But if we look at the crisis in the Church as a whole, the problem is clearly not one of execution, but rather of principles.
What is the use of quibbling over whether a more honest translation of the new Mass will cure its many ills when the fruits of the whole experiment have proven so disastrous! I stood before that shuttered Catholic church because the liturgy for which it was built ceased being offered there, and the clear Catholic doctrine that used to be preached from its pulpit is no more. This was not a mistake made on the margins; rather, it was a wholesale change in direction with cataclysmic effects. We took the wrong path, and when one takes the wrong path and realizes it the only solution is to turn around. There is no other choice. Indeed, a remnant in the Church is doing exactly that right now, working their way back to the right path and begging shepherds and fellow sheep to do the same.
They say we are experiencing springtime in the Church, and indeed we are. But not the springtime promised or anticipated. Springtime is necessarily a period of rebirth – and we are witnessing the rebirth of the Church in the most unlikely of places. It is not happening at ordinary Catholic parishes. It certainly is not happening at meetings of regional conferences of bishops. It is happening, however, on the dining room tables of home-schooled families. It is happening at afternoon Masses offered in inconvenient places according to the ancient form. It is happening among large families that reject artificial birth control and its surrogate— “natural family planning”. It is happening among teenaged girls wearing veils in churches. It is happening with young priests discovering the fullness of their priesthood in the old Mass. It is happening among fathers who embrace their role as head of the household and single providers. It is happening among mothers who once again are the hearts of Christian homes. It is happening among families that pray the rosary together. Simply stated, it is happening among those who view the traditional Faith as the single most important part of their lives. It is happening, and, to the extent that any of us are a part of it, we can take heart in knowing that the revolution has failed. God will not be mocked much longer.
Instead of the Orwellian “springtime” that was as manufactured as the liturgy upon which it was based, the real “springtime” is an organic movement of the faithful who are coalescing around the ancient traditions of Christianity. And as miniscule as it may seem at the moment it is growing, and it is growing at a time when the world thought it long dead and buried. Like the mustard seed of the first century, the Christian men and women of the remnant of faithful Catholics are again at work in the vineyard.
So while we may live in Pottersville for the moment, it won’t be forever and all hope is certainly not lost. Rebuilding Christian civilization is going to be difficult and it’s going to take time but, Deo Gratias, it has already begun.
http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2010-1231-gawley-pottersville.htm
Aftermath
And my people, upon whom my name is called, being converted, shall make supplication to me, and seek out my face, and do penance for their most wicked ways: then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins and will heal their land. 2Chr:7:14
“In Dangers, in Doubts, in Difficulties …”
Queens, New York: October 30, 2012
“In dangers, in doubts, in difficulties, think of Mary, call upon Mary. Let not her name depart from your lips, never suffer it to leave your heart. And that you may obtain the assistance of her prayer, neglect not to walk in her footsteps. With her for guide, you shall never go astray; while invoking her, you shall never lose heart; so long as she is in your mind, you are safe from deception; while she holds your hand, you cannot fall; under her protection you have nothing to fear; if she walks before you, you shall not grow weary; if she shows you favor, you shall reach the goal.”
-Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
DEFEND us, O Lord, we beseech Thee, from all
dangers both of soul and body ; and, by the intercession
of the glorious and blessed Mary ever Virgin,
Mother of God, of blessed St. Joseph, of Thy holy Apostles
Peter and Paul, and of all Thy Saints,
grant us, in Thy mercy, health and peace ; that all
adversities and errors being done away, Thy Church
may serve Thee with a pure and undisturbed devotion. Amen
Father Forgive Them
The Waldorf Astoria, New York October 18, 2012
In our time more than ever before, the chief strength of the wicked lies in the cowardice and weakness of good men… All the strength of Satan’s reign is due to the easy-going weakness of Catholics. Oh! If I might ask the Divine Redeemer, as the prophet Zachary did in spirit: What are those wounds in the midst of Thy hands? The answer would not be doubtful: With these was I wounded in the house of them that loved Me. I was wounded by My friends, who did nothing to defend Me, and who, on every occasion, made themselves the accomplices of My adversaries. ~Pope St. Pius X, Discourse at the Beatification of St. Joan of Arc, Dec. 13, 1908
Although he again lost Protestant voters to his GOP opponent, Obama held onto his advantages among Catholic and Jewish voters. He won 70 percent of the Jewish vote, down from 78 percent in 2008, and he won Catholic voters 50 percent to 47 percent. Romney carried Protestant voters by a 13-point margin, 56 percent to 43 percent. (Source: Politico)
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