Losing the Battle - but Winning the War
We lost this battle: ‘To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace …’.
Hence we reaped this bitter harvest: ‘if not, [Russia]
will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of
the Church …’.
The
fault was our own.
With
this in mind, we would have to agree with George Weigel, who, when writing this
month that “US court decision to give same-sex marriage equality with traditional
marriage puts it at odds with the Constitution, reason and biblical religion”, proceeds to make
this intriguing comment – {that we would expand to include the Catholic Church
in Australia} (“Ruling says it
all: the law is an ass”):
The Catholic Church in
the US bears its share of responsibility for this incoherence. It was clear 60
years ago that the old mainline Protestant cultural hegemony was fading, that
an alternative cultural foundation for American democracy was necessary, and
that a new cadre of citizen-leaders, capable of articulating the moral truths
on which the American democratic experiment rests, had to be raised up – and
the prime candidate for doing all that was the Catholic Church. It might have
happened. But too much of the Church’s clerical and lay leadership lost its
nerve after Humanae Vitae; the window of opportunity closed amidst the
maelstrom of the 60s and the decadence of the 70s; and the forces of
incoherence won the day.
[End of
quote]
Saint Augustine warned us that the Devil is like an angry, furious dog on a chain. If we keep him at bay and remain distant we are safe, but never provoke this furious beast. If we foolishly stray into his ambit, then we can expect to suffer a dire mauling.
Weigel continues: “…. The New Normal will not
leave the Catholic Church alone”.
The upside to struggle, though, is that it builds
character, even fosters genius:
So the Church must
learn, fast, how to play good defence, defending the right of our people and
our institutions to be themselves; it will do a service to America in the
process. (A good primer for thinking through these issues is the recent
pastoral letter by Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, Being Catholic Today:
Catholic Identity in an Age of Challenge.)
[End of
quote]
We need to become as persistently annoying to the
proponents of what Weigel has labelled the “New Normal” as they have become to
us. But, owing to that former loss of nerve, the battle to win the war has now
become much harder. Weigel again: “Like everyone else who contests the New
Normal’s ideology of Anything Goes, the Catholic Church will be aggressively
attacked for daring to oppose that ideology”. That furious Dog is biting
savagely.
The
Enigma that is Russia
Not only could Russia potentially spread her errors
(Our Lady at Fatima, 1917), but she actually began to do so, according to
Sister Lucia, after World War II (1945). Pandora’s Box, containing all the
evils of the world, was now opened.
It was only in 1984, with the collegial Consecration
finally done - but some six agonising decades late - that a ‘mechanism’ was set
in place to stem the flow. Soon the Soviet Union began to collapse.
Sadly, ‘Russia’s errors’ had by now become ‘the
world’s errors’, so that it was no longer sufficient simply to consecrate
Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And so Pope John Paul II, in the afternoon of March
25, 1984, inside the Vatican Basilica and before the pilgrim statue of Our Lady
of Fatima, consecrated (or entrusted) the fate of the entire World to Her:
So today we have wanted to entrust the fate of the world, of
individuals, of peoples, to your Immaculate Heart in order to arrive at the
very center of the mystery of Redemption, the mystery that is stronger than all
the sins of man and of the world, the mystery in which one can conquer sin in
its various forms, in which one can begin, can inaugurate, a new world.
Whilst error must ever be refuted, the tone of the
Church at present - with error now so rampant - seems to be more emphatically to
promote the Truth.
Today, unpredictable Russia, once the cause of so
much human misery, appears to be slowly but surely shifting in the right
direction. Gabrielle Kuby writes of this dramatic new outlook (https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/from-russia-the-a):
Twenty-five
years ago, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still holding its
conventions in the Kremlin under the iconic hammer and sickle, no one would
have dreamed what would happen there on September 10 and 11, 2014: Inside the
Kremlin, the heart of Russia, a two-day international conference was held with
the title “Large Families and the Future of Humanity” — pro-life, pro-family,
aiming to protect the moral foundation of family and society. ….
The people in the hall certainly don’t
agree on Putin’s behavior in the Ukraine conflict. They do agree, however, that
we are in a global anthropological crisis that is attacking the nature and
identity of the human person, and they share the same determination to rise
against it.
The topic here was not simply the family,
but large families, because they can reverse the demographic crisis that
threatens the future of Russia, not to mention that of most countries in the
West. However, here the problem and its causes were put out in the open: U. S.
journalist Donald Feder, advisor to the World Congress of Families and a wise,
practicing Jew, said, a false perception of sexuality is the cause of the
demographic crisis, specifically the idea that sexuality is for enjoyment only
and must have no consequences.
On the contrary, sexuality’s foremost
purpose is the creation of human life in the bond of love between man and
woman. Because pills and condoms cannot always obstruct this creative force, we
kill 50 million unborn children around the world every year. And we continue to
do so despite the obviously menacing consequences, because we have a false
concept not only of sexuality, but also of freedom. This false freedom knows
nothing but the autonomous, commitment-free, self-defined individual, fed by
gender ideology that denies God and nature.
[End of quote]
A consequence of the intensification of their efforts
by the purveyors of world error will be that those who reject this New Normal ‘civilisation’
of queerdom must begin to put aside what divides them and more earnestly seek
to unite. This must eventually lead to a reunion of East and West, enabling the
Catholic
Church again to “breathe with two lungs” -- East and West alike -- rather than
with only one Western, or Latin, lung (John Paul II). Interesting, then, to
read (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/historic-meeting-between-):
An
historic meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian
Orthodox Church is "getting closer every day," a senior Orthodox
prelate has said.
The
unprecedented meeting would be a significant step towards healing the
1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity,
which split in the Great Schism of 1054.
"Now such a meeting is getting closer every day but
it must be well prepared," Metropolitan Hilarion, the head of the Russian
Orthodox Church's foreign relations department, said in an interview with
Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper.
[End of quote]
Satan
with a crushed head versus a Church breathing with its two lungs?
No
contest.
Another
step in the right direction towards unification would be to correct what Pope
Francis has called the ‘scandal of the disunity’ of the date for Easter, thus signalling
his openness to changing the date so that all Christians around the world could
celebrate the feast of Easter on the same day. The Pope on June 12 said “we
have to come to an agreement” for a common date on Easter.
Whilst all these developments might take time to
accomplish, Our Lady of Cana, who hastened the Lord’s “hour”, can speed up grindingly
slow human processes.
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