A Bright Future is Already Here
Volume XXVIII, Number 10
August 13, 2024
Ah, my friends. I hope you missed me as much as I missed you.
I just survived and recovered from a two-week road trip around the country to attend a leadership conference in Napa, California, while visiting my son out there and Mary Foundation associates along the way (including an unscheduled two-day vehicle repair in Arizona).
I started at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to return a first-class relic of Saint Francis de Sales which Keith Nestor generously loaned to the Mary Foundation during the three painstaking months we spent translating de Sales' How to Pray from the archaic seventeenth-century French.
It's at the printer now. We'll release this great saint's extraordinarily potent 37-page book in early September—it's the guide Father Ripperger recommends!
How to Pray is my passion project for you personally. Every minute of every day for the rest of your life will be transformed. Do. Not. Doubt. It.
God is Winning in the U.S.A.The Napa conference hosted over seven hundred faithful Catholics—including what seemed like a hundred young nuns in full habits and every flavor of faithful priest (there were beautiful Masses all day long every thirty minutes starting at 6:00am, often in Latin).
For four days, from early in the morning until midnight, I conferred with dozens of authors, founders of apostolates, hedge fund managers, pro-lifers, publishers, social media influencers, lawyers, presidents of colleges, television producers, heads of religious congregations, fellow troublemakers, CEOs, and a large number of young leaders.
I Represented YouOne man, the youngish president of his own tech company, brought up a seemingly unrealistically optimistic article I wrote back in 2012 (and just updated today) called "A Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America."
It's a comprehensive "30,000-foot view" of what occurred in the Catholic Church in America since the early 1970s and focuses on what is happening right now—and what will continue to happen in the future.
Remember, my faithful friend, that I have personally lived through every day of it since boyhood. The article was jolting at the time, because hope and optimism were in short supply after so many decades of institutional church implosion and vast spiritual carnage.
During the past dozen years, just about everything I foresaw came true—in addition to many amazing developments I could not imagine.
Those seven hundred apostles I saw were a mere sliver of what Our Lady has been doing in her country. There are doubtless many more real, innovative, and powerful initiatives in her vast array which I did not see at Napa.
The words, "We're going to win!" kept coming to me, time and again, as the days passed, especially during Eucharistic adoration. I sensed that you were there with me.
I have posted the first third of the updated "Bright Future for the Catholic Church in America" after my signature below, or you can read it right now:
You will definitely be surprised—it is not what you are expecting—and filled with heartening recent developments and insights. It is also the sober fruit of years of research—with no sugar-coating of the dismal reality many of us have endured during our lifetimes.
And yet, my projections from twelve years ago continue to manifest the divine plan of God the Father!
You will not regret at least starting it (nor reading the whole thing).
My short version is that the evil one took his best shot at destroying the Catholic Church in America—and he failed.
This is because Our Lady of Guadalupe set North America aside for God's worldwide plan for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and it is culminating right now during these next pivotal few months and years.
So no matter how dark and depressing current events appear, let nothing disturb you. God is winning and He is going to win. We simply need to persevere in holiness, carry our crosses with joy, and stand in awe as the Fatima Victory plays out.
Now let's get to a few quotes and our "group" prayer with tens of thousands of readers.
Quotations"Have you ever wondered why you have not yet become a saint? If you're like most people, the answer is simple: you need to spend more time with Jesus."
- Fr. John McCloskey in Seven Daily Habits for Faithful Catholics
"True science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree, as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science."
- Pope Pius XII
"A dead thing can go with the stream but only a living thing can go against it."
- G.K. Chesterton
"A vague lack of serenity? Dark cloud following you around? Then stop being such a haphazard, undisciplined, or lukewarm Catholic. The most wonderful thing, the most exciting thing, would be for you to finally get up off the pavement before God spits you out of his mouth."
- Joseph Wood
"In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace."
- Our Lady of Fatima
Horrific war looms. I composed this today from my heart, so please join me and tens of thousands of CatholiCity citizens in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...
O my Jesus, through the intercession of your Immaculate Mother, to whom America is forever consecrated, unleash the legions of angels from heaven to prevent the planned wars and political evils which beset our beloved and beleaguered nation—by your Everlasting Father's mighty hand, we beg thee to sweep into the abyss the diabolical forces behind these human evils.
May the Eucharistic Reign of Christ be manifest!
Saint Michael the Archangel, protect us!
Guardian Angel of the United States, protect us!
Saint Joseph, Terror of Demons, protect us!
Saint Anthony, pray for us!
Saint Kateri, pray for us!
All of our relatives in heaven, pray for us!
Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us.
Amen.
And...that's it for today. "Bright Future" begins below.
Everything is going to be all right. Never doubt it.
I wonder what is behind today's Mystery Link?
With Saint Joseph,
Bud Macfarlane
Founder
A Bright Future for the Church in America
What follows is a hopeful and perhaps jolting look into the Catholic landscape in America over the next two generations. For our purposes, we will define "faithful," "orthodox," "devout," "traditional," or "authentic" Catholics as those who believe and strive to practice what the Church teaches as the Catholic Church herself teaches it. It is impossible to understand what the coming generations of Catholics in our country will be like without a brief survey of the past, so there we shall begin.
The Church Implodes
In the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s, the Catholic Church nearly self-destructed in terms of maintaining itself as a self-perpetuating organization. Here we are considering the Church as an institution in a particular country, not as the mystical Body of Christ. Large numbers of priests left the priesthood, candidates for the priesthood dwindled dramatically, and seminaries began to close down. Most of the clergy who remained embraced liberal views and practices justified as being supported by distorted, misleading, or downright contradictory interpretations of the teachings or purported "spirit" of Vatican II. The minority of faithful priests who remained were often persecuted or exiled to the smallest rural parishes. Entire congregations of nuns began to shrink in size or disappear altogether.
During the 1970s the traditional Latin Mass was more than merely abandoned; it was effectively suppressed, disparaged, then forgotten while being replaced with a new, insipid Novus Ordo vernacular Mass. Into the 1980s through the early 2000s, most Catholics born after 1960 were effectively ignorant of its existence or have never experienced its beautiful reverence, sublime mysticism, or the fearless teaching of its priests.
Sunday Mass attendance, as a rough and minimal indicator of the spiritual commitment of Catholics, dropped from large majorities of baptized Catholics (at 80%) to small minorities (at 20%). This 20% figure has held steady or fallen only slightly since the turn of the Millennium. Virtually all Catholics stopped going to Confession regularly, if at all. Married Catholics as a whole ceased to be open to having large families with numerous studies or surveys showing that almost all (perhaps up to 98%) actively rejected the Church's rich teaching regarding the transmission of life. Liturgical abuse abounded in ways too numerous to describe here. Once stalwart Church institutions, from grammar schools to virtually all colleges, ceased to be authentically Catholic.
Additionally, powerful cultural forces outside of the Church contributed to its disintegration: the widespread practice of the sexual revolution; post-modern secular philosophies (largely atheistic if not antagonistic to religious belief); the explosion of substance abuse; consumerism; secular feminism; the ever-spreading sleaze in the entertainment industry; the rise of the occult—along with the rapid increase of a largely anti-religious government intrusion into every aspect of life (the most horrid example being the legalization of abortion via judicial fiat by the Supreme Court) and the legal degradation of marriage itself. All these forces and more hammered away at the Church and her members.
Many in the tiny percentage of faithful Catholics who remained placed responsibility upon ineffectual or openly liberal bishops and the liberal priests and nuns who dominated everyday life in parishes. I was assured by a very reliable source that a majority of our bishops were prepared to break away from Rome (schism) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If you are nearing sixty years of age, you were a child when this implosion of the Church began playing out. Anyone younger can only glean how dramatically and quickly the Church fell apart from numerous books written on the subject (such as The Desolate City by Anne Roche Muggeridge, first published in 1986).
More recently, Dr. Taylor Marshall documented the purposeful, historical, and theological efforts to devastate the one, true faith in his bestselling book, Infiltration, the Plot to Destroy the Church from Within.
In short, the Church hierarchy, her clergy (including most congregations of nuns, who administered and staffed a heretofore spectacularly successful alternative parochial school system), and virtually all of the laymen in the Catholic Church in our country failed to inculcate the one, true faith to tens of millions of souls comprising two generations of Catholics. This phenomenon was not limited to America, with the Canadian province of Quebec being the starkest example, transforming from one of the most homogeneously Catholic societies in modern history to one of the least in less than a decade. European Catholicism had already been in rapid decline since World War II. In August 2011, Pope Benedict movingly acknowledged this tragedy by apologizing for "generations" of "cradle Catholics" who failed to receive the true Faith.
For Catholics willing to ponder the reality of the devastation via the testimony of faithful whistleblowers in the hierarchy itself, such as Archbishop Viganò, the reign of Pope Francis has only served to confirm the corrupt rulership, false teachings, homosexual infiltration, cover-ups of abuse, and the generations-long roots of the "heresy of heresies," Modernism, permeating the worldwide Catholic Church.
A seeming low point occurred in 2020, when, at the pope's behest, virtually ever bishop on the planet effectively shut down lay access to the Mass and sacraments during the pandemic—including during all of Lent and Easter!
The Tiny Remnant of Devout Catholic Families
Based on our research, including reviews of decades worth of polling bolstered by professional interaction with thousands of Catholics, we estimate that fewer than five percent of Catholics in the United States believe and practice what the Church teaches as the Church herself teaches it in accord with Sacred Tradition. This tiny minority makes up a minority of the twenty percent of baptized Catholics who still regularly attend Sunday Mass. These statistics can vary greatly depending on the diocese and parish, but of the approximately fifteen million Catholic families in the United States, we estimate that there are roughly 200,000 families raising children under the age of eighteen who live in accord with the magisterial teachings of the Church—or a handful of families or fewer per parish. These families consider being devoutly Catholic the unparalleled purpose of life. These families will never abandon the true Faith.
The Next Two Generations
As we have seen, beginning in the 1970s, the Church in America was severely damaged over a period of three generations. Yet out of the tiny minority of faithful Catholics remaining, countertrends surfaced almost immediately in the 1970s, including the founding of alternative publishing houses (such as St. Ignatius Press); the birth of a handful of small, dynamic new Catholic colleges; the formation of new religious congregations; the reform of parts or offshoots of existing orders and congregations; the nascent sprouts of Latin Mass communities; and a movement that many now overlook, known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which deeply and permanently influenced the spiritual lives of hundreds of thousands of the faithful in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lay media apostolates such as Keep the Faith (audio tapes) and Catholics United for the Faith were founded to help the devout minority resist the avalanche of confusing or contradictory teachings being disseminated in parishes and educational institutions.
Pope John Paul II was elected in 1978 and over the next three decades installed dozens of more faithful American bishops as old-guard liberals retired or died. An achingly slow and often painful reform of seminaries began. His wildly popular Theology of the Body is just one example of how the Church responded effectively to modern intellectual and cultural attacks on families. A master marketer, he introduced powerful concepts and pithy phrases such as "the New Evangelization" and "the Culture of Life" into the worldwide Catholic lexicon, while personally evangelizing every corner of the earth, including a special focus on reaching young Catholics through biennial World Youth Days. Additionally, he embraced the Internet, reformed the Code of Canon Law (not always effectively, according to some faithful critics, especially in the area of dealing with abusive priests), and introduced the supremely successful Catechism of the Catholic Church, which continues to be an invaluable resource for faithful Catholics.
...continue reading the rest of Bud's article.
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