I have been wondering whether to share some sad and negative things I have learned being in Europe the past few months.
I think that God has allowed me to experience and see some changes which I know believe I must share.
Let me say that God is allowing evil to be unleashed upon the earth for His purposes of purging the faithful and correcting those who are in deep sin.
But, how does this look from this side of the Atlantic?
A few points.
One, more and more people are falling into negativity and cynicism about their fellow human beings. People are less and less seen as individual human beings and more and more as cyphers.
This type of mind-set has happened before under the communist regimes and under Nazism.
The root of this type of attitude is utilitarianism and hatred of the good.
Two, the poor are being more and more marginalize by the rich an powerful. Those in the middle-class seem to be panicking, realizing finally that there is a small but powerful coterie of the super-powerful and super-wealthy who will run Europe leaving democracy in the dust. Some people sense this and are getting nervous. Some people do not want to know and, sadly, some people will cooperate with destroying the dignity of poverty.
Three, the Catholic Church is now the enemy of the nation-states, which are coalescing into one big government. Do not kid yourselves, as power is becoming more and more centralized across national boundaries and more and more dictatorial.
Four, was is looming on the horizon-I predicted that Europe will be involved in some type of war by the end of the year. One can sense the unrest, and see the fact that even the terrorists are being used by larger forces. Anarchy will be the end result of this new war.
Five, people who are evil assume other people are evil and, therefore, cannot be open to the Gospel. There is no good news.
I could write more points, such as those regarding the divisions in the Church, even among trads.
Enough for now. Something big will happen in 2015.
Thursday, 15 January 2015
The Slamming of The Doors
The glue which kept Europe together as
Christendom has finally dried up. Nations are becoming less
accessible to each other despite the EU, as nationalism, rather than
patriotism, rears its ugly head again. What kept borders open in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance was Catholicism, and the presence of
the universal Catholic Church.
Can one imagine St. Bernard, St.
Dominic, or St. Catherine being refused entry to any country.
Can one imagine the lack of the sharing
of scholarship and prayer which formed Europe ending?
Can one imagine the purposeful stopping
of community life among orders, which pre-date the very nations which
now seek to discourage the presence of missionaries?
Even 15 years ago, as I am discovering,
this tightening of borders, because of the unwillingness to allow
Americans of a certain ilk, that is Catholics, into countries, to
study or work or even get married, began. Stories shared with me in
the past week indicate that at least 13 years ago, perhaps because of
9/11, but I doubt that, boundaries and barriers to Catholics were
beginning to occur.
Silently, slowly, surreptitiously,
people here and there were being denied access to certain countries,
Great Britain being the most obvious.
Why?
I repeat what I have written here
before on this blog. What institution threatens the nation-states,
communism, socialism, and all the modernist heresies which now are
the new glue binding people together in Europe?
What institution created by God Himself
stands for Truth in the face of greed, selfishness, ideologies,
idolatry?
The one, true, holy, Catholic and
apostolic Church—period.
Many years ago, people who were
oppressed could leave nations under tyrannies. Now, where do these
people rest?
The Jews are being chased out of Europe
again.
The Catholics have been marginalized
and not one bishop or cardinal here on this continent has spoken out
against the encroachments of the states against the Church.
Seculars and those of man-made
religions have made unspoken pacts against Christ and His Church.
Unless Catholics wake up and rally, the
moment of strength will be lost. Perhaps, it is too late already.
Souls, which could have been saved by the preaching of the true
Gospel will be lost because doors have been shut to the spreading of
the Good News of Christ.
Ours is the only religion which looks
not to material goods, the goods of this world, as rewards, but to
the Love which we hope to experience in the next world.
Ours is the only religion which
internalizes spiritual growth, as opposed to those religions which
only emphasize the exterior acting out of religion. The Catholic
Church from the beginnings of Peter's declaration of faith has
pointed to our eternal life with God as the goal of all labor and
prayer on earth.
Without this sense of who man is, why
he was created, and for Whom he owes his very being, false religions
and isms crush humanity under the weight of gross materialism—either
in the siren song that this life is all there is or in the false
ideal that heaven is merely a series of materialistic rewards and not
Union with the Trinity.
Preach and teach while you can. The
doors to evangelization slam shut daily. And, tragically, those who
stand on the outside of the Church will be facing the onslaught of
evil without grace, without community.
If God wills to shorten the
tribulations to come for our benefit as believers, how will those
without the means to cope with the devastation of their cultures, all
once based on Christendom react?
There are pockets of remnant people,
but some still cannot see the truth of what is happening around them.
The early, persecuted Church had room
to move, disperse, grow. We shall not have this luxury.
Either Catholics stand firm against the
three-pronged evils of false religion, secularism and
neo-nationalism, or the Church will disappear in many, many places.