The Election and the Worldwide Death Cult
by Bud Macfarlane
Like many of you, I was deeply discouraged by the 2012 presidential election results. The Catholic Church now faces an immediate crisis in our country, and I am in agreement with the following article by George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II.
In particular, Weigel advises:
"As for the opportunity embedded in this crisis, it is nothing less than to be the Church of the New Evangelization, full-throttle. Shallow, tribal, institutional-maintenance Catholicism is utterly incapable of meeting the challenges that will now come at the Catholic Church from the most aggressively secular administration in American history. Only a robustly, unapologetically evangelical Catholicism, winsomely proposing and nobly living the truths about the human condition the Church teaches, will see us through the next four years. Radically converted Christian disciples, not one-hour-a-week Catholics whipsawed by an ever more toxic culture, are what this hour of crisis, in both senses of the term, demands."
Unfortunately, the "full-throttle" Catholics to whom Weigel refers remain a small minority within our own Church (perhaps under 5% of the baptized and fewer than one out of five of the 20% who still go to Mass on Sunday). To bolster your hope, I wrote about the dramatic expansion of our numbers over the next two decades, along with our greater influence in positions of authority within the Church.
The thrust of my article is the "radically converted Christian disciples" of whom Weigel speaks do not materialize by happenstance. In a practical sense, there are only two sources for such Catholics: the grown children of our own devout families or the people we, as laymen (along with a recovering institutional Church), actively convert or revert.
This is why the Mary Foundation and the handful of other apostolates in America (such as Catholics Come Home, led by Tom Peterson, the speaker on our new CD, "Bringing Catholics Home") which emphasize or enable large-scale evangelization of fallen away and luke-warm Catholics are so critical to our nation during these dark times.
It is absolutely our responsibility, relying on God's grace in union with our actions, to convert as many people as we can as soon as we can while we still have the civil freedom to do so. Trust me when I assure you that there is no hidden army of Catholic evangelizers waiting to be unleashed. It is you and I, or nobody. If you are game to get started, or, to increase your efforts, you can order our free materials here:
https://secure.catholicity.com/
THREE SPHERES: THE ZEITGEIST IS DEATH
Our long-time readers know that I have provided myriad reasons for hope in these messages, but my hope is based on supernatural faith, and I believe only an extraordinary intervention from God, along with our heroic cooperation, can defeat the Culture of Death in our nation and our world. To have hope grounded in reason, we must assess the reality of the world we live in.
If we take a step back and look at the world in terms of three dominant cultural-political spheres of the post-Christian West (Europe, America, and South America), the Islamic World (the Middle East, North Africa, and large parts of Asia), and the East (China, Japan, Korea, etc), you can see that the evil one has successfully institutionalized his anti-life agenda over the past century on a worldwide scale.
Japan has the lowest population replacement rate in the world. Korea is in similar straits. Communist China's forced abortion policies are well known.
European countries, including Russia, with the U.S. not far behind, have been well below replacement levels for population growth for decades as our societies increasingly reject the traditional family. Larger percentages of the increasingly godless younger generation are postponing or are foregoing marriage and childbearing altogether at rates unseen in human history.
Our own federal government is now forcing religious organizations and those who own businesses to provide sterilization, abortifacients, and abortifacient contraception such as the pill. Catholics are now officially second-class citizens under the law. A handful of European nations (and states such as Oregon) now provide and/or encourage euthanasia for the old and infirm. Abortion not only remains a scourge, but was a centerpiece of the current administration's reelection campaign.
As for the Muslim world, we documented in a recent message the dramatic drop in birthrates in the Islamic countries over the past three decades. With the so-called Arab Spring, radicalized Islam, and its hatred of Christianity and Judaism, as well as its imposition of barbaric Sharia law (which is simply a religious form of civil authoritarianism) is expanding successfully, not waning.
Furthermore, the permanent socialized welfare buracracies which practically define modern first-world countries combined with these radical negative population shifts and anti-life policies, which are now deeply imbedded into western law and culture, guarantee long-term economic disruption, if not collapse (we lack the space to go into the economic details).
As Fr. John McCloskey wrote in his post-election article: "Our country is morally as well as fiscally broke. Of course, these signs of decline are all interconnected."
From the widespread acceptance and availability of pornography to illegitimate birth rates to the implosion of mainstream Christian churches, I could go on for page after page with variegated evidence of a worldwide embrace of the satanic Culture of Death, as defined and prophesied by a succession of popes dating back for over a century. Virtually every government in modern world has legalized immorality. And, as Saint Thomas Aquinas pointed out, The Law is a Teacher.
The evil one, "unchained" as Our Lady has confirmed in many approved apparitions in recent centuries and decades, fortified with his immense intellectual power, is ruthlessly executing his long-term plan to destroy Christianity and the civilization it has bequeathed to the entire modern world.
From this realistic perspective, the election of a moderate, fiscally-oriented candidate representing the pro-life party in our country may have slowed the rising tide of the worldwide death cult, but it would not have stopped it. Weigel and McCloskey are correct: the only hope is holy Catholic Christianity, and not just for our country, but for the entire world.
Which means the only hope is you, your children (and grandchildren, if you are of a certain age), and the people you help God convert by your sacrificial efforts to evangelize and support others who ardently strive to evangelize.
DARK DECADES LOOMING?
"Torture us, rack us, condemn us, crush us. Your cruelty only proves our innocence. That is why God suffers us to suffer all this." Tertullian
The coming expansion of devout Catholics within the Catholic Church in America does not mean our children will enjoy in the overall secular culture the religious freedom we took for granted just a few short years ago.
Our bishops face great challenges, both legally and in terms of courage, and it remains to be seen if they are up to the task. I believe most finally are coming to understand the nature of the battle. That two generations of bishops who came before our current bishops decimated the Church in America and Canada is no longer the issue. We must pray for our bishops and for our countries every day, and if possible, do so at daily Mass. Are you doing this? If not, please resolve to begin.
History and the world are littered with formerly Christian territory. Whole parts of Asia Minor and northern Africa, the heart of the Church in early centuries, now contain very few Christians. In recent years, to give just three examples, millions of Christians have been persecuted, murdered, and legally marginalized in the Islamic-dominated countries such as Sudan, have been driven out of Iraq, and are currently fleeing Egypt in astounding numbers.
At the turn of this millennium, Fr. John McCloskey has predicted a smaller, more faithful, persecuted Catholic Church in the pages of CatholiCity. We have all literally lived through the seemingly inexorable secularization of the United States in both law and cultural practice over the past two generations. Short of the break-up of the United States, with one or more resulting sub-nations providing a Christian safe haven (which would likely be preceded by calamities none of us would welcome), the trend is negative and can be disheartening. God never promised that the United States, which has survived two civil wars (including the American Revolution), was destined to remain a fundamentally Christian nation, much less a unified republic of states under the now toothless constitution adopted in 1787.
Politically, all in not lost in America, and the nominally pro-life political party has strengths. 24 of 50 states rejected the pro-abortion candidate, usually by huge majorities. 29 states have Republican governors. There are more faithful non-Catholic Christians within our borders than anywhere in the western world. There are tens of millions more Americans of varying religious fervor who deeply cherish their freedom. For those of you interested, here is a sober analysis by a political writer I respect, containing more than a few positive facts.
WERE OUR PRAYERS ANSWERED?
Before the election, with tens of thousands of CatholiCity.com patrons and on our own, along with tens of millions of Christians across America, we prayed for a pro-life outcome. Were our prayers rejected? From a human perspective, it seems that our plea for help from heaven was spurned. Perhaps God has had enough of America and her wanton, legalized sexual indulgence and her tens of millions of chemically and surgically murdered unborn. Perhaps He permitted the evil one to send Hurricane Sandy to batter the northeast, cause the death and suffering of so many, and reportedly, to sway a number of voters just in case an anti-life victory was in doubt.
My faith and my instinct tells me that our prayers were answered, just not in the way we foresaw, and that God still has a plan for America that remains hidden from the evil one.
It took early Christians three centuries of suffering, martyrdom, outlaw status, and supernatural faith to usurp the Roman Empire from within, followed by centuries more struggle to convert the pagan barbarians. I told my sons after the election: if our beloved country continues down this path, it will likely do so while oblivious that modern democracy, education, science, healthcare, and civilization (including the technology it spawned required to make the likes of smartphones) are the fruit of Christendom.
Before the civilizing effects of Christianity, totalitarianism, slavery, inequality, sexual license and exploitation, human sacrifice, and brutally constant warfare characterized the pagan world. We are well into a new era of a secular paganism that first blistered during the late eighteenth century French Revolution (wherein over 30,000 nuns, brothers, and priests were executed by the first godless modern state). The post-Christian era is now rapidly depleting the inheritance of civilization that was Jesus' gift to the world through Christendom. Last century, godless Communism murdered, incarcerated, and enslaved many tens of millions in the Soviet Union and Communist China and in myriad other countries. Few know that after the Communist Revolution in 1917, one of the first laws passed in Soviet Russia was the legalization of contraception. In 1920, the Soviets became the first modern nation to legalize (and pay for) abortion. Pagan, socialistic Nazism legalized and institutionalized euthanasia of the old and "unfit" (mentally and physically disabled) several years before World War II when twelve million Jews and Christians died in the death camps. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nazi eugenicists and leaders from Planned Parenthood (then called the Birth Control League) in America collaborated openly and often.
In short, the foundations have been crumbling for a long time.
God chose for us to live in these particular historical times. We must not only accept His choice, but we must love it and embrace it fully. Here at the Mary Foundation, we have always gauged the cultural landscape thusly: there are tens of millions of lukewarm and fallen-away Catholics in our country, the greatest potential harvest of converts and reverts in the history of mankind. And we have unprecedented tools and technology to reach and convert every one of them.
All we lack are harvest workers in the great field of souls. So the Mother of God brought you to us, even if this article is your first introduction to the most dynamic Catholic evangelization apostolate in the country. And if you join us, you will bring more harvest workers to our mutual work over time. In short, let us convert everyone--first America and Canada, then the world.
MARY WILL CRUSH THE HEAD
There is still the promise of Our Lady in numerous approved appearances that there will be supernatural intervention via her intercession, after a period of unprecedented turmoil, to redress and reform a horrifyingly sinful world. I do not visit this topic often, despite having written the most widely read fictional (but non-prophetic) account of such events in my first novel, Pierced by a Sword. I do not know, nor do I try to anticipate, when God and our beloved Immaculate Mary will act decisively. It might be next month and it might be decades from now. Perhaps her triumph has begun and will take years to become apparent. I sincerely do not know. Until that glorious era of the Eucharistic Reign, we can all enjoy it now by receiving Holy Communion, if at all possible, every day, while inviting as many souls as possible to join us at the heavenly feast.
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Bud Macfarlane, founder of CatholiCity.com and the Mary Foundation, is the author of three bestselling Catholic novels, available free of charge from Saint Jude Media. You can comment on his articles here.
