Probably a Catholic commentator. How did we get to this stage, where Catholics think the legal right to homosexual marriage is self-evidently wonderful and uncontestable, and a Pope’s defense of a poor woman’s impotent attempt to obey God’s law on marriage is ridiculed and help in contempt? I shall try to shed some light on this question today, but first a joke! 

1. The bartender says "we don't serve time-travelers here". A time-traveler walks into a bar.

1. If we could travel in time, to a time and place where things were better than they are now, when and where would you choose, and why would you choose it? Some would say before 911, before the never ending War on Terror and the police state. Some before the 1950s, before the sexual revolution and where the middle class was thriving. Some before the devastation of the World Wars, and before the growth of the welfare/nanny state that emerged after them. Some before the Civil War, before the centralization of the Federal government under Lincoln when states and individual citizens had more autonomy. And some sometime before the Reformation, perhaps that greatest of centuries, the 13th, when Christendom still existed. 

1. Whatever place and time one chooses, one can reflect on the criterion for one’s choice. More political or economic liberty, greater prosperity, a greater moral consensus, a healthier culture, better medicine!—but for Catholics, there is only one real criterion—How does this time and place, this culture, this political and economic order help or hinder me in knowing and loving God, becoming like Him, and thus saving my soul. In other words, how does this place and time enable me most effectively and easily best to know and possess my Good, the Good.

1. But since my Good, including both my supernatural flourishing in the theological virtues of Faith, hope, and charity, causing the conformity of my soul to God, and my natural flourishing in the natural moral and intellectual virtues, requires a cultural and political milieu ordered to these goods and virtues, that is, ordered to the Good of my eternal soul, then the conclusion is clear. The desired destination of my time-machine must be to that place and time that is best for my soul.  

1. Now, there are no time machines, and although we can take a plane to any country in the world, we can’t escape modernity, and, like it or not, we are, in the West at least, stuck with modernity’s default and seemingly inexorable political and cultural milieu: secular, pluralistic, centralized, liberal democracy. How are things here and now for our souls? Is this the best possible political and cultural arrangement for our natural and supernatural flourishing? If not, what exactly is wrong with it? But isn’t this the wrong way to think about all this, since what modern liberal democracy, especially in America provides, is precisely that long-sought-after liberty, for both individuals and groups, wherein one can most freely choose a conception of the Good and freely live it out? Isn’t this, after all, what the American Founders brought to these shores and to the whole world, the triumph of religious liberty, under which, as even Leo XIII admitted in writing, the Church has grown and thrived in America? Isn’t the American experiment in “ordered liberty” the culmination of classical and Christian thought about and practice of politics?  Didn’t the Second Vatican Council essentially magisterially endorse the American model, and only the American model, of religious liberty and the separation of Church and state?

1. Before we can answer these questions, we must take a step back and reconsider and question and perhaps even challenge our present understanding of ideas about the good, man, ethics, virtue, the state, the Church, and the relation of all these to each other? Why should we do this? As I shall discuss presently, any social and institutional practice aiming at some sort of common good embodies a theory, and, in turn, the theories we hold about ethics and politics emerge in our minds through our own participation in ethical and political practices. The upshot of this is that if our practices embody erroneous ideas, then our ideas that derive from such disordered practices will themselves be disordered. And if mistaken were the ideas in the minds of those statesmen who first set up the institutions the practices of which we and our ancestors have been participants for centuries, then our own ideas about these institutions and practices, including our evaluation of their goodness and truth, will, insofar as we have accepted them naively without substantive critical evaluation, be mistaken as well. 

1. In short, we need to reexamine those ideas, beliefs, habits of mind, and values we have as a result of our being habituated in, at the most general, modernity, and more specifically, the specific historical and geographical version of modernity that is the American tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre tells us that an tradition is simply a historically embodied argument about the Good, and that humans are tradition-constituted animals, meaning that our concepts and arguments, as well as the practices from which these emerge, are derived from and embodied in a tradition. Now, as twenty first century American Catholics, we are participants of several traditions, some of which we are active and willing participants, some passive and quite unwilling. One. 

1. We are first and foremost, as traditional-minded Catholics, active and willing participants in the the Catholic-Augustinian-Thomistic tradition. But as Americans, we are by default participants in ideas and practices of the classical liberal tradition of the Enlightenment, the American Founding, and those remnants of this tradition still active in American culture, what MacIntyre refers to as Encyclopaedia. And finally, we are unwilling and passive participants, by being surrounded by it, particularly thorough its takeover of popular culture, academia, and law, the postmodernist tradition of “genealogy,” or, as you may better recognize it, the will-to-power relativism inaugurated by the late nineteen-century German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, and that has been continued to this day in various manifestations, from the radical multiculturalism of the left, the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt school, and the nihilistic neoconservativsm of Leo Strauss and his protégés on the right. 

1. Regardless of the influences of the various traditions on our thoughts and actions, we are not at the mercy of these, and there is only one tradition that claims our ultimate allegiance and that active participation in which can, with the help of God’s grace, counteract and even sanctify any evil influences on us so that they can be occasions of growth in the knowledge and love of God. As Chesterton tells us,  “The Church It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” So let us now examine our Divine tradition’s philosophical and theological understanding of things political so as to establish an infallible foundation and standard with which to measure and evaluate our own minds and the ideas deriving from those merely human traditions that have influenced us.

1. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. Politics is, in a word, a politics of the soul, of the good, and of happiness. In Plato’s conception in Republic, the city is the soul writ large, and the proper ordering of the soul, with reason, over will and emotion, over appetite, is the model for the proper ordering of the city, with philosopher kings ruling over the body politic according to the transcendent form of the Good. As an application of ethics, ordered to the good, human happiness, individual and then communal level. Happiness as a state, not feeling, an achievement over a whole life. Human excellence. Plato: Care of the soul. Matter and form. Talk about. Ethics is a science of the good, based upon the nature of man. Man-as-he is to man-as-he-could-be-if-he-reailzed-his-telos. The virtues are the means to this end. Virtuous activity, moral and intellectual virtues. Politics, architectonic practical science, on achieving the good on the communal level, the common good. Good is a transcendental, is a predicate of Being, is a universal, essential reality, for man has an universal essence, a telos, a nature that can be perfected by certain activities.  Perfection of the intellect by truth, perfection of the will by the good, perfection of the soul by possessing the true and the good and living a life ordered by and to these transcendentals. The highest political act is one that transcends politics, the leisurely contemplation of Truth in imitation of the Prime Mover, the purely immaterial and perfect God who is embodied thought itself. 

1. We seek the good together in a political community, the polis, the city. The polis is a natural creature, not a man-made artifact, for it is part of man’s nature as a political animal. It is more amenable to human will as its particular form is indeterminate, but nevertheless it has features that are unchangeable and normative. Self-sufficient, a “perfect”, meaning complete, community for the good life, the life of noble activity, emerging from and including families and villages, which are not self-sufficient or complete, as they cannot without the city for a properly human life, being in need of the social cultural, intellectual, spiritual resources of the city.  

1. Personal action is governed by the natural law, which is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God in his providential ordering of creation, manifested to us in our will’s inclination to goods that perfect us, such as knowledge about the world and God, and living in loving community with others, ultimately ordered to the ultimate Good, God Himself, and such goods require us to pursue virtues that enable us to achieve these goods, such as courage, and avoid behavior that threatens these goods, such as lying and violence. Thus, human laws, derived from or otherwise in accordance with the natural law, is needed to order individual and corporate action towards these goods and the Good. These laws direct us to act in accordance with and even cause in us the virtues that enable us to achieve happiness. 

1. Political authority, then, is legitimate, and only legitimate, regardless of its origin, hereditary or elective, or method of governance, democratic or aristocratic, when it uses its power to govern for the common good and the happiness of the people. This is the criterion for political justice. Monarchy, rule by one, Aristocracy, rule by a few, and Democracy, rule by the many are all good political orders if they rule for the sake of the good of the people, not merely themselves, for if the latter, monarchy becomes tyranny, Aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, demagoguery and anarchy. In short, the purpose of the city is to make men virtuous and therefore happy, by means of well-ordered laws and institutions. And since one of the cardinal virtues is prudence, and since prudence is best developed and exercised in the political life of the city, having as many of its citizens as possible participating in ruling by cooperative deliberation regarding how best to achieve the good, is a prime desideratum of the best regime. 

1.   Now Plato and Aristotle and Cicero got things mainly right in terms of the nature of ethics and politics, even though in practice, they did not (Slaves, women, scapegoating, infanticide, and, of course, the decadence and injustice into which the Roman republic fell both before and after the coming of Christ. They may have said many true things about human happiness, the good, and political justice, but did they really achieve these? Were their pagan cities able to secure the full flourishing of its citizens? Were they truly able to attain virtues by their laws and practices? Did these cities embody true justice? Were their citizens truly free and happy?

1. St. Augustine in his City of God tells us that we can evaluate a city by the character of its love, for a body politic s former by nothing other than a common object of love. Justice, giving to another what he is owed, is measured by this love, and “Where there is no justice there is no commonwealth.” He is speaking of his present day Rome, as well as all pre-Christian cities. For Augustine, there is no justice in a city unless the city offers and is ordered by the right worship of God, and only the City of God, not the City of Man, can offer just worship, as he writes: “Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord.” 

1. With the coming of Christ, we now have two cities, not one, and God calls everyone to become a citizen of the City of God and leave the City of Man in order to render justice to God and secure justice in one’s soul. Ethically, what Christianity makes men aware of, as did Judaism in the past, but only with the Jews, was, not only an ethics of happiness, virtue, human flourishing, and the good, but an ethics of divine command, sin, and salvation. “Be holy as your God is holy” was something entirely new to the Greeks and Romans, and when, after the sack of Rome by the barbarians, these pagans accused the Church and the new religion of destroying the Roman empire, Augustine wrote the first political theology and theology of history to show that precisely the opposite as the case: that the pagan states were never just, were overseen by demons, and caused disorders and evils that were only kept in check by counteracting disorders and evils, sacrifice to demons and human sacrifice.

1. With Jesus’s declaration to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God which is God’s, we have the definitive break with the pagan political theology. Now, what we owe to the city is not the same as what we owe the gods, as if the city encompassed God. God was owed all of our being, and the city itself owed its very existence to God. What we owe to the City is not the city’s prerogative to command, but Gods. In this way the City of God relativized and circumscribed the City of Man, so no longer could the earthly city claim the obedience and life of its citizens, and the tension between the two has never abated, though the proper ordering of the two was set out in theory and attempted in practice in the middle ages, beginning with Constantine’s making Christianity the religion of the empire. 

1. The philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, particularly metaphysics and ethics, was not rejected but was transformed and elevated in light of the new two-tier understanding of reality. Being was created from nothing by a God outside of nature, nature was ordered to supernature, to grace, and the access to grace and the supernatural was only possible by Faith, through Baptism in the Roman Catholic Church. Original sin made it impossible to obey the natural law and to obtain true virtues, for though the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude were understood, and the goal of life as happiness in the exercise of virtue and the knowledge of God was known, God-pleasing virtue and knowledge of the true God was not possible without Faith and grace, and membership in the City He founded and of which He is King. 

1. The earthy city is a natural creature of God, so it is subject to His authority and the laws and ends he put into nature. These laws are intelligible to human reason, but because of man’s sin they are obscured in content as well as in their obligatoriness, so the Church must be seen as the highest authority over not only each person but over the city itself, for our membership in the City of God takes precedence over any other membership. 

1. The most authoritative and developed teaching on the proper relation of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, the Church and state, was given by Leo XIII in two encyclicals, Immortale Dei and Libertas Praestantissimum. The essential teaching is that the relation of Church and state is analogous to the relation of the soul to the body in man, as Leo states: “There must, accordingly, exist between these two powers a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man. The nature and scope of that connection can be determined only, as We have laid down, by having regard to the nature of each power, and by taking account of the relative excellence and nobleness of their purpose. One of the two has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life; the other, the everlasting joys of heaven. Whatever, therefore in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority. Jesus Christ has Himself given command that what is Caesar's is to be rendered to Caesar, and that what belongs to God is to be rendered to God.”  The upshot of this teaching, is that, just as the soul and body, when separated, leads to the death of the body and the impotence of the soul, so to when the Church is separated from the state, the state begins to corrupt, reverting back to a glorified crime syndicate in which the ruthless and cunning rule and enslave others according to their own disordered passions, what Augstine called, libido dominandi, literally, the lust for rule, that satanic passion that leads one to tyrannize others and oneself. 

1. The best, most succinct, and powerful articulation of the right relation of Church and state is given by the 19th century English theologian William Ward: “The Church professes to be infallible in her teaching of morals no less than of faith. If, then, Catholicism be true, and if Catholics have the fullest ground for knowing it to be true, the one healthy, desirable, and legitimate state of civil society is that the Church’s doctrines, principles, and laws should be recognized without question as its one basis of legislation and administration; to the Church’s authority.”

1. The classical and medieval conception of politics and the Church is complex, but it can be summarized in a way that will make its contrast with the modern, liberal conception, which we shall discuss presently, quite stark:

Men are political animals, meaning that they are born into political community of their very nature. Man has a end that is part of his very nature, eternal happiness, which includes a natural happiness that is ordered to the supernatural one. Both natural and supernatural happiness can only be attained with the help of others in a well-ordered social and political life of various hierarchical authorities and social groupings—family, town, city; parish, workplace, school,;guild, sodality, and confraternity--one ordered by and to the good, both natural and supernatural, whose laws, practices, and institutions embody the natural law and aim at the common good, which is full flourishing of human beings in lives of virtue, love of God and neighbor, and contemplation of God. The city is a natural creature, and thus it must be ruled by and ordered to God. Its authority is a participation in the divine authority of providence, and it is only legitimate and worthy of obedience and participation when it is actually ordered by and to the common good, when its laws reflect and embody the natural law, and when it accepts its limits, the ordering of temporary affairs for the sake of heavenly ones. 

Man does not have a natural end per se, but only supernatural one with a natural component, and the city’s ultimate purpose is to help men get to heaven, to care for their soul, as Socrates was right to claim, to help men attain their supernatural end. For this purpose, there is a necessary union of Church and state, and the state, as well as all other non-ecclesial social and political practices and institutions, are under the authority of Christ in everything, and so of His Church, in all those matters that pertain to the Church’s temporal and spiritual authority, in faith and morals, the sacred, and in declaring and securing the ultimate purpose of man’s existence.  Christ is the King over both persons and states, and all authority derives from His universal kingship, and must answer to His will, which has been made manifest in the teachings and laws of the Catholic Church.

1. Modernity: Needless to say, this view of politics and its relation to religion in general and the Church in particular is no longer publicly authoritative and understood, and I daresay that most Catholics in the west do not hold it. 

We know that the change in viewpoint occurred gradually, beginning sometime after the 1300’s, and the studies that have been written regarding this process are legion and can’t possibly be accurately summarized here. But here’s one listing, and here I will read a bit from an essay I have written on the topic of the nature of modernity:

Modernity is inadequately characterized as a mere chronological time period, on the one hand, or a timeless abstract idea, on the other. It is, rather, better described as a culturally and historically embodied consciousness and cast of mind, in the words of Charles Taylor, a “social imaginary.” For, in spite of how it is depicted and narrated by its more superficial devotees, modernity functions in practice as a religious culture. It possesses a historically located origin (the Renaissance or Enlightenment); a sacred event or set of events (the Reformation, Treaty of Westphalia, Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution); sacred texts (Kant’s sapere aide, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution); sacred dogmas (the separation of church and state, and religion and politics, individual rights, “religion” as non-coercive and private, the toleration of all beliefs, “the right to define one’s concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”); a perpetual enemy and source of evil (dogmatic belief, religious war, intolerance, racism); and lastly, a soteriology. If we use William Cavanaugh’s definition of soteriology as that which makes peace between competing individuals, modernity’s soteriology is manifold, including the political hegemony of the nation state owning the exclusive right to employ coercive force, the privatization and freedom of religion, scientific advancement, and commercial prosperity; for the late-moderns, we can add private self-creation, moralistic therapeutic deism, a globalistic market of multicultural carnivals, a trans-humanistic utopia without truth and therefore without terror.

         If I had to take a stab at defining it, modernity, in the West, is essentially what happened to Christendom after it was dehellenized, nominalized, and secularized. In its Enlightenment mask, it is an ahistorical, non-ideological, world-view-neutral account of “the way things are and have always been,” bereft of the superstitious, irrational, freedom-suppressing and ruler-serving, ancient-medieval theoretical and practical apparatus of scholasticism, priestcraft, oppression, and feudalism; in its post-Enlightenment persona, it is a parasitical cultural growth aping Christianity and Christian culture while repudiating it in its nihilistic, anti-logos core. Modernity is Christ without the cross, in its liberal democratic manifestation,and it is the cross without Christ, in its totalitarian strains. Modernity is an anti-Aristotelian tradition of rationality, depriving persons of the knowledge of their good and the ability to attain it personally and corporately. It embodies the moral and spiritual fruits of the Gospel’s affirmation of ordinary life, to use Taylor’s expression, the dignity of each person, and the freedom of the children of God—along with the negation of the Christian soil, trunk, and branches that engendered these fruits. Modernity is a liturgical and ecclesial counterfeit of the Church, attempting to unify in its artificial Levianthanian body all people in a national and global church of peacemaking and violence-restraining violence. It is the sundry failed attempts at cultural, economic, political, and spiritual order within a seemingly inescapable nominalistic, theological framework; the result of the extrinsicist separation of nature and grace and the triumph of secular reason; the priority of freedom-from in the anti-trinitarian cultural form of the machine. And it is the dethroning of a theology of primordial peace and the apotheosis of an anti-theology of fearsome violence. 

1. Instead of trying to unpack this description of modernity in both its historical origins and development, and in a detailed analysis of its concepts and guiding habits of thought and practice, I would like to just outline the main differences between the modern liberal conception and the Catholic-Thomistic. And I will conclude by describing the predominant strategy of Catholic intellectuals to engage late-twentieth century modern liberalism in its American form, and why this strategy failed and was doomed to failure.

1. The most succinct and accurate contrast between pre-modern and modern politics can be seen in the contrast between pre-modern and modern ethics, for, as we have seen, ethics is the foundation of politics, and a problem with the former will entail a problem with the latter. The three components of ethical inquiry in the classical and medieval conception were: man as he is, man as he could be if he realized his telos, natural and supernatural happiness, and that which can bring man from the former to the latter, namely, the natural and supernatural virtues and moral commands and rules, the obedience to which and proper practice of which requires a city whose laws, practices, culture, and institutions both embody and enable the possession of the virtues and all the other natural and supernatural goods that constitute man’s happiness.

1. Due to the error of nominalism in the 14th century, which lead logically to other errors such as subjectivism, fideism, and materialism, one component of this scheme was rejected, namely, man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos, and this rejection was first made by Catholics and then Protestants. Once the knowability of universal essences were denied, their existence was denied as well, and so first man’s nature was considered unknowable, and then the existence of human nature itself was denied. 

1. Thus ethics was left with two components, man as he is, and a set of moral rules and virtues that were still felt to be obligatory, but now not because obeying these rules and practicing these virtues enabled men to attain his end, human happiness, but, well, just because!

1. Combine this Enlightenment rejection of Plato and Aristotle’s metaphysically-based ethics with the rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church in the Protestant revolt, and we can see the political manifestation of these two errors, one philosophical and one theological, in the emergence of the social contractarian, rights based, secular nation state, in the late 16th and 17th centuries.

1. The Enlightenment rejection of Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics, and thus his ethics, and politics can be seen most of all in the writings of people like Niccolo Machiavelli, Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, but the intellectual architects of that institution that embodied this rejection, the secular, liberal, rights-based, contract-based nation state, are Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.

1.  What are the main features of this new, revolutionary institution? As Enlghtenment, modern man is no longer conceived of as a political animal born into community, for whom political life is natural and good because enabling him to achieve his telos, but as an individual with no telos who is born in a lawless state of nature, the state is constructed by men to secure, not virtue and his good, but power, individual liberty, and his rights, and thus the authority of the state, including its laws, is no longer God but men, given to the state by their consent. When God creates something, it is God’s. But when man creates something, it is man’s.

1. In order to secure individual rights and liberties, the state must have absolute sovereignty over its citizens, who are defined as individuals residing in a certain geographical space whose consent to the state’s authority is implied, meaning that there can be no competing authorities in the wielding of coercive power over citizens. People are free to believe in God and practice whatever religion they like, but churches, just like any voluntary social group, can possess no public or political authority, since that has now been given to the state, whose custodianship is over all civil atters. Religion is not a civil but spiritual matter, and so, though the state has no right or authority to interfere in its doings when those doings are kept in its proper sphere, religion has no right or authority to interfere with the doings of the state. Any particular conception of metaphysical, spiritual, and ethical good and authority is thus rendered private and sub-political, and though men have the right to believe in such a good and such an authority, it can have no public, political authority in the state, whose authority is “political not-metaphysical,” and whose coercive power in law must be based solely in man’s consent for the limited purpose of securing his individual, pre-political rights and liberties. 

1. In short, the medieval city was: a creature of God, a part and participation in the cosmic order and thus under the authority of cosmic and natural law, ordered to man’s natural and supernatural good and thus based upon in all its laws and practices a public conception of man’s good, both natural and supernatueal. Being self-sufficient for man’s natural, temporal needs, justice, and the common good, the various authorities and laws of well-ordered earthly political orders must be obeyed, but since man is ordered to a good that transcends the temporal and the earthly, namely God, it has only a relative, finite, and limited authority. The Church, being instituted by the God-man, has a wider, more comprehensive, and ultimate authority over men, in both personal and political life. Thus, an unjust law is no law at all, as Augustine says, and does not have to obeyed, and political authority, when it is disobedient to the natural and divine positive law, and thereby not ordered to the common good, is no longer sovereign, loses its authority. 

1. In the modern, liberal, secular, rights-based, contractarian nation-state, on the other hand, the state is a creature of the will of men, under no antecedent cosmic and natural and divine authorities, ordered not to the attainment of man’s good, but his rights and liberties. It’s authority is absolute in this regard, with all other social bodies, including the Church, under its authority in the political, public, civic sphere. Man is left alone to determine his own conception of the good, which he may live out privately and socially, but not politically.   

1. How did such a revolutionary change in politics and Church and state come about?  

(READ) Only in secular modernity did man finally achieve his liberation from oppression and ignorance, from superstition, magic, tyranny, and priestcraft, from the dark forces of religious power, fanatical belief, and sectarianism. Man achieved this liberation primarily through the secularization of reason, morality and society, which was effected through the separation of religion from the political order, church from the state.  Ever-increasing religious and ideological pluralism ensued as soon as previously oppressed men of good will were permitted to exercise freely their reason and act on their consciences. It is certainly the case that when Christendom was finally broken up in the wake of the Reformation, religiously intolerant, confessional, monarchical states emerged, but these evolved quite quickly, historically speaking, into the secular, tolerant-minded, pluralistic, democratic states we have today. The rise of secular society after the sixteenth and seventeenth-century “wars of religion” (to see why this phrase must be put in scare quotes, see the pioneering revisionist work of William T. Cavanaugh) was rendered possible only by the removal of “religion” (a creation of the modern state, as Cavanaugh shows, being unprecedented in its newly depoliticized and privatized form) from all positions of political significance and power. Good-willed, reasonable people were ready and willing to accept the desacralization of the state, so the story goes, after centuries of witnessing incessant bloodshed over religion. Sequestered, depoliticized, and privatized, religion and the sacred would now no longer cause war, divisiveness, and oppression, and the newly liberated, autonomous, politically secular individual could finally thrive. In the religiously tolerant, secular, pluralistic liberal democracy governed by the rights of men, not God, the sacred would still have a place, as well as a capacity to exert influence over politics, but now it would have to coexist with the many competing, private sacreds residing in the same city, now proliferating and dwelling together in peace precisely because none are permitted to obtain societal, cultural, and political power, let alone a monopoly on power.  

In short, secular modernity was born at the moment when the archaic, violence-inducing sacred lost its public, political hegemony and influence, having been relegated to the sub-political, private sphere of men’s fancies and hearts. What took its place in the public square is what should have always been there in the first place, the absolute right (well, restricted only by the equal rights of others) of the individual to self-determination, to freedom of thought, action, speech, property, and religion. Prescinding from the question of the ideological accuracy of this just-so narrative, it can be said with certainty that in modernity man attempted, for the first time in human history, to construct a political order not based upon the religious or the sacred. While not denying the right of every citizen to believe in a sacred, superhuman, cosmic, divine, transcendent power as the true ground of man’s existence, both personal and social, the theoreticians of the modern paradigm, people such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Madison, and Marx, justified, by appeals to reason, common sense and consent, historical inevitability, enlightened sentiment, or even the Will of God, the replacement of secular values and rights codified in a social contract, the general will, a constitution, or the party line for any supposed power or will higher than man.

In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla articulates tersely the desacralization paradigm: “The liberation, isolation, and clarification of distinctively political questions, apart from speculations about the divine nexus.” He continues: “Politics became, intellectually speaking, its own realm deserving independent investigation and serving the limited aim of providing the peace and plenty necessary for human dignity. That was the Great Separation.”

1. The response to modernity and the secular state in the 19th century, articulated in the authoritative pronouncements and statements of Popes such as Gregory XVI, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X, was overwhelmingly critical and even condemnatory, where such modern phenomena as freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and the separation of Church and state were unequivocally condemned, and the traditional model of the Catholic confessional state, with the Church the soul of the state’s body clearly upheld. 

1. After World War II, and especially during and after the Second Vatican Council, however, the Church became more amenable to modern liberalism and the religiously pluralistic secular rights-based nation state, and while not rejecting the traditional model of the confessional Catholic state as ideal, it apparently accepted the now predominant non-confessional model, with the insistent qualifications that its laws and institutions be based upon the natural law and ordered to the common good, and that it permit its citizens a robust religious liberty, which it now asserted was based in man’s nature and willed by God.  

1. John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain were the main proponents of this new development on Church and state and they wrote elaborate philosophical and theological justification of it. They began a debate the resolution of which has become much more relevant today, even urgent, for Americans, as the government attacks on the religious liberty of Christians increase, the decadence and violence of culture deepens, and the American empire of libido dominandi and perpetual war metastasizes. Were Murray and Maritain, and Richard Neuhaus, wrong. Are the Catholic conservatives who insist that the nation-state given to us at the American Founding was essentially right and good, and that if the American government and citizenry would only return to its original understanding of religious and ordered liberty, we could again have peace and prosperity and virtue under the good-pleasure of almighty God? 

1.  (READ): The question boils down to this: Can political power and unity be derived and justly exercised from a purely immanent and secular source in separation from the authority and guidance of the Catholic Church, that is, from a contract made by humans with humans alone? I think the answer is no, that the liberal, democratic, rights-based model of the state, and its Lockean conception of the relation of Church and state, as established in America in 1787, is fatally flawed, and cannot be redeemed. Let me conclude by trying to explain why I think this, not so much in terms of abstract principles, but in terms of an interpretation of recent events.

1. First, I’d like to give an argument for my position based upon philosophy and theology. After this, I will conclude by giving an argument based upon a certain interpretation of a pattern that can be seen in some significant current events.

SO, first the philosophical and theological argument: 

According to St. Thomas, men cannot adequately understand in theory, let alone fulfill in practice, the detailed precepts of the natural law without the help of its author, God, and its divinely appointed interpreter, the Roman Catholic Church.  With regard to a non-sacral foundation for political order, Thomist Joseph May in the 1950s stated: “The only true doctrine is that civil society cannot prescind from the ultimate end [emphasis mine] both because the temporal welfare implies an ordering to the spiritual and supernatural, and because the individual citizens are directly and positively bound to tend to it”  The Church has not changed its view on this, and till affirms it, unequivocally! Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II insists that it “leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine about the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ" (Sec. 1). As Pope John Paul II often reiterated, the face of Jesus Christ is the only true mirror in which man can fully and accurately contemplate and comprehend his own nature and destiny; thus, only therein can he discern the moral values and goods most perfective of himself and the political order.

 However, the desacralized, religiously pluralistic, secular state supposes that authentic political peace is possible without the majority of citizens’ spiritual rebirth through Baptism and the infusion of sanctifying grace that comes primarily through the Church’s sacraments—and without the formal guidance of the Catholic Church on fundamental moral and political issues. For as we have seen, St. Augustine, true peace and goodness was just not possible outside the society of Christian believers, as is suggested in De Civitate Dei in which Augustine judged the “peace” of Rome, the exemplar of the “city of man,” no peace at all in comparison to the true social peace that can only come from social obedience to Christ in the city of God. 

Should Christians be optimistic, then, about the prospect of genuine common good being effected in and through a desacralized, secular, pluralistic, contractatian state? Perhaps the answer is that we must work with what we have, which is not bound to be supernaturally transformed anytime soon. And perhaps the modern state simply is something essentially different from the ancient and medieval one, that it is, by practical, historical, demographic necessity, a historically irreversible, desacralized state. Perhaps this is as it should be, for now the sacred has found its proper home in the Church and the mystical body of believers, both its actual and potential members. Perhaps it is a good thing that the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, is now the locus of sacrality. 

However, in any society, Christian or not, should not citizens attempt to create a political order whose public culture permits not only the free practice of one’s religion, whatever that may be, but also, in a religiously pluralistic culture such as ours, a political and cultural ethos most conducive to discovering and practicing the true religion, or, if one is non-religious, the secular values most conducive to human flourishing? It is hard to see why the pluralistic, desacralized state could facilitate this sort of ethos better than the religiously unified, sacral state; thus, there is a good argument that the real “power of religion in the public sphere” must be a sacred power. 

Jim Kalb characterizes liberalism as not only a tradition, but a religious tradition: 

The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and purpose of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world, moral obligation, and the human good—in other words, which religion is correct. Liberalism cannot get by without answering that question, but it answers it indirectly, by claiming moral ignorance. We do not know what the good is, it tells us, so we should treat all desires the same. The satisfaction of all desires thus becomes the unquestionable good. Man becomes the measure, human genius the principle of creation, and individual will the source of value. The limitations on moral knowledge on which the liberal outlook is based lead to a definite result, and so become constituent principles rather than limitations. In short, they constitute a religion, a fact concealed by the moral doubt that is liberalism’s first principle. This new religion, based on the denial of the knowability of truth, consists in nothing less than the deification of man. To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot know anything about God, but only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world. In short, you will say that we are God.

Now, the liberal state never explicitly affirms “we are God,” for in its official agnosticism, it does not even explicitly deny or affirm the possible or actual existence of a transcendent being. Moreover, it insists that it leaves open the possibility of some such being’s revealing or having revealed himself and his will to man. Secular liberalism, that is, the purportedly non-theocratic state, simply does not deem it necessary to recognize any such being and revelation for the purposes of either political philosophy or political practice. It claims public ignorance about, but does not deny outright the possibility of, an authoritative revelation demanding personal recognition. 

Yet, the believer in a being who has clearly and publicly revealed to man his will for the political order could argue that a studied ignorance regarding the existence of such a publicly accessible divine revelation is intellectually unjustified and politically unjust. For a Roman Catholic, for example, the Church exists as a public institution claiming to be the embodiment and spokesman of a publicly authoritative divine revelation bearing directly on morality and politics. Therefore, the Church is at least a possible candidate for a publicly authoritative social institution. Even if one prescinds from the question of the truth of this revelation, the Church’s claim about itself to be the authoritative spokesman for this truth is still an objective, intelligible fact within societies, and while a political philosopher can deny the truth of this claim, it cannot plead ignorance to the fact of the claim itself. Thus, in articulating any ideal political order, the political philosopher must deal in some way with the Church’s claim to have the authority to define the ultimate meaning of goodness and politics, by either recognizing or denying the Church’s public authority to do so. Practical agnosticism to the very possibility of such an authority is, in effect, an implicit moral judgment of the injustice of its ever becoming an actual, living authority, and therefore an implicit theological denial of the authority it indeed has (from the Catholic perspective). In other words, the so-called religiously-neutral, secular state guaranteeing religious liberty is no such thing. It is a confessional state, on which confesses the rejection of the social Kingship of Christ and the supernatural political authority of the Catholic Church. Davis Schindler writes:  “A nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either “freedom from” or “freedom for”—both of these priorities implying a theology.”

Any moral or political theory involving the question of ultimate political authority that excludes this theological issue from its purview inevitably makes a theological judgment, as D. Stephen Long points out: “Ethics cannot be the province of a philosophical discourse that brackets out theological consideration, unless philosophers assume a being greater than God giving access to goodness.” 

Claiming ignorance or uncertainty of the truth of the Church’s claim to public authority, or even just acting as if one were ignorant or uncertain of it by committing oneself to a political theory and practice in which the Church’s authority could never, without causing grave injustice, be publicly recognized, is effectively to make a negative judgment about the Church’s claim. In practice, it amounts to a theological judgment against the Church’s authority, and when such a judgment becomes part of a lived social, cultural, and political tradition, and becomes embodied in its set of practices, one can, with Kalb, accurately call such a tradition a religion.

Authority in society, in order to fulfill its basic function of organizing the social activity of human individuals, must determine, authorize, and implement practical answers to matters that are inextricably bound up with religious considerations and commitments: life and death (What is a human being? Whom does the government have an obligation to protect? Who speaks authoritatively on these issues?); war (What is the criteria for conscientious objection? For just or unjust war?); sex (Is fornication or adultery to be socially celebrated, prohibited, or ignored?); the family (Is marriage an unchanging social and religious institution, or is its character open to perpetual redefinition by individuals?); rewards and punishments (What kinds of behaviors should merit societal approbation and opprobrium?). Social and political authorities must inevitably consider and make judgments regarding these issues; even the decision to depoliticize and privatize these matters, leaving these questions to be settled freely by individuals, is socially and politically significant. Thus, “secular” “non-theocratic” regimes are de facto religious regimes, in this sense: that even if there were a way fully to depoliticize these sorts of issues, there could never be “religious neutrality” on the part of the state with regard to them. If there is a possibility of a God-ordained answer to any of these questions, and if there is an institution that claims to articulate authoritatively this answer, then societal and political authority must respond one way or another to this claim. In conclusion, what John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain were supporting, a religiously-neutral, secular, natural-law governed nation state, never existed, and doesn’t exist now. There are only confessional states, and so the question becomes—what religion is the state going to confess, and if it isn’t Christ and the Catholic religion, what will it be? In this next and concluding section of this talk, I will give an possible answer to this question, and it’s not a pleasant one.

Romano Guardini has written: “The law of the state is more than a set of rules governing human behavior; behind it exists something untouchable, and when a law is broken it makes its impact on the conscience of man. Social order is more than a warrant against friction, than a guarantee for the free exercise of communal life; behind it stands something which makes an injury against society a crime. The religious dimension of law suffuses the entire moral order. It gives to ethical action, that is action necessary for the very existence of man, its own proper norms, which it executes from without and without pressure. Only the religious element of law guarantees the unity and cooperation of the whole order of human behavior. 

And Thomas Molnar: We are thus approaching societies without the sacred and without power. To use the words of Gauchet again, the political enterprise is no longer justified in calling itself the concretization of the heavenly law. Political power is subverted in its symbolic foundation and sacred identity. Its roots, hence its mediating legitimacy, have been removed by a quiet revolution. Liberal democracy has proved to be a passage from society founded on the sacred to society founded on nothing but itself. 

Rémi Brague has warned us that, “Such a contract (the secular nation state), precisely because it has no external point of reference, cannot possibly decide whether the very existence on this earth of the species homo sapiens is a good thing or not.” 

I posit that what we are experiencing today in American and in the West is a continual irruption and increasing proliferation of violent, crisis-making events that bear the features of “The Sacred”—consider the attacks of 911 and the War on Terror, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the terror of ISIS for example. Consider the reaction of the overwhelming majority of Catholic conservatives to Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses for gay couples, “She should obey the sacrd “law of the land”—or resign!” What we are presented with in each of these events are impeachable narratives, an ethos of fear and awe, the sudden unification of factions, in short, the religious-like gathering together of all citizens in defense of the sacred State.  In short, the phenomena of the sacred is as publicly present, influential, and authoritative in secular modernity as it ever was in the ancient “religious” world. Can modern man really live without a publicly authoritative sacred? And when he has repudiated the traditional sacred, or perhaps has just forgotten about it, is he bound to concoct sacreds of his own, in his own fallen and depraved image? Listen to the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describe the sacred character of the 911 event:

The mythology created around September 11 was predominantly Christian in its themes. The day was converted into the political equivalent of a holy day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled multiple functions: as the basis of a political theology, as a communion around a mystical body of a bellicose republic, as a warning against political apostasy, as a sanctification of the nation’s leader, transforming him from a powerful officeholder of questionable legitimacy into an instrument of redemption, and at the same time exhorting the congregants to a wartime militancy, demanding of them uncritical loyalty and support, summoning them as participants in a sacrament of unity and in a crusade to “rid the world of evil.

Thomas Molnar writes: Must the political order be derived from a cosmic model (or, at any rate, from an external, transcendent reference point), or are there valid and effective substitutes? Can unaided humanity, through the mobilization of its faculties, create a sacred, or at least a myth, powerful enough to convey a model? If the answer to these questions is no, we must ask then: Can a community exist without the sacred component, by the mere power of rational decisions and intellectual discourse? 

No, I say. A community cannot exist without a sacred component, and when the traditional sacred of monotheism was rejected in modernity with the rise of the desacralized nation state, the shrine did not remain empty. 

An objection might be raised here. Even if it were a delusional mistake to try entirely to desacralize politics and power, did not secular modernity bring us the freedom of religion, the rule of law, civil equality, and representative government, that is, unquestionably beneficial institutions and practices unheard of in the pre-modern world? We can say with certainty that modern liberal democracy, insofar as it has provided the political, legal, cultural, social, and psychological space for the free exercise of reason and conscience, and as it has helped men to flourish physically through its scientific, technological, and medical advances is a considerably good thing. But what is the price we have paid for all these secular advances? Was the dethronement of the traditional sacred from its rightful place at the heart of society, culture, and politics worth it?—“What profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his very soul.

One way to characterize the sacred is that which is considered absolutely good, under, around, in obedience to, and in pursuit of which men order their individual and corporate lives. Insofar as secular liberalism denies that such a metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual good, if it even exists, can or should have any public authority in civilized society, it is delusional and hypocritical. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

Initially, the liberal claim was to provide a political, legal, and economic framework in which assent to one and the same set of rationally justifiable principles would enable those who espouse widely different and incompatible conceptions of the good life for human beings to live together peaceably within the same society. Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to, unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it. . . . And this qualification of course entails not only that liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in so doing its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited.

Since secular liberal culture is, according to MacIntyre, founded upon a particular conception of the good, namely, the sacral good of the privatization and desacralization of all claims to truth, and a particular doctrine of truth, the irreducible plurality of conceptions of the good/sacred; and since the publicly authoritative rhetoric of liberal culture includes a denial of having any substantive sacred conceptions of its own, what liberalism amounts to is an institutionalized religious sacred—but one that indoctrinates citizens into disbelieving in its very existence as such. Just as the puppeteers in Plato’s Cave must ensure that the shadows they cast on the wall in front of the shackled slaves are never seen by them as shadows, else the cave be identified as a cave and the prisoners break their chains in revolt, the “secular” state must never be exposed for what it really is, a sacred power exercising hegemony over all competing sacreds, which it has effectively privatized and neutered. Thus, its own sacred dogmas become unimpeachable, unquestionable, uncontestable, and, most importantly, invisible. It judges all beliefs and actions in accord with these dogmas, and executes its definitive judgments through its terrible liturgical violence and murderous ritual scapegoating, masked by the language of rights, democracy, freedom, security, diversity, equality, and tolerance. Orwell, eat your heart out. 

 All political orders require a mechanism for engendering and preserving unity, and the sacred has always been the source and engine of this unity. It is no different in our “modern” day. At the shrine of Charlie Hebdo, for example, “free speech” became God, but a god with no substantive core, no divine identity, and no supernatural content. It is a cunning idol, nevertheless. It commands only toleration, and it promises only freedom. Yet it tolerates—and encourages—only blasphemy and ridicule of precisely those competing sacreds it seeks to vanquish, the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and the sacred personages of Mohammad and Christ—and it persecutes any who dare to critique its sacred nihilism. The desacralization, profanation, and degradation of Christianity and Islam is, since Charlie Hebdo, the official meaning of “free speech.”  

1. 911 and the Satanic Sacred

Although Charlie Hebdo was quite a sacred spectacle, 911 was the exemplar of secular modernity’s sacred. I have discussed this claim in more depth elsewhere, but for now it is sufficient to point out its uncanny resemblance to traditional sacred mythology, ritual, and sacrament. 

James Allison, an eminent theologian and expert on the thought of René Girard, the latter of whose oeuvre amounts to the complete unmasking of all non-Gospel-centered cultures as murderous, ritual scapegoating mechanisms, has given the most penetrating account of the 911 event as the nexus of satanic sacred power in the West. It is worth quoting in full:

And immediately the old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. All over London I found that friends had stopped work, offices were closing down, everyone was glued to the screen. In short, there had appeared, suddenly, a holy day. Not what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an older form of holiday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to participate in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the meaningless suicides. . . And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. Phrases began to appear to the effect that "We're all Americans now" -- a purely fictitious feeling for most of us. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero, a togetherness that would harden over the coming hours into flag waving, a huge upsurge in religious services and observance, religious leaders suddenly taken seriously, candles, shrines, prayers, all the accoutrements of the religion of death. And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives. And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying things like "to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter." And beneath the militant goodness, suddenly permission to sack people, to leak out bad news and so on, things which could take advantage of the unanimity to avoid reasoned negotiation. . . . What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic.

All human beings “delight in being given meaning,” but the meaning given to the masses through the 911 and Charlie Hebdo events is as meaningless as it is idolatrous and psychopathic. Charlie Hebdo informs us that those who aren’t comfortable with public, state-supported mockery of other citizens’ religious beliefs are equivalent to murderous terrorist fanatics. Through 911 and the War on Terror that followed, the United States, as the metonymic Twin Towers and the World Trade Center,  was transformed into a suffering and resurrected God, scourged and crucified by the forces of pure evil that “hate our freedoms,” but brought back to life by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et.al., as mediators of the immortal righteousness of the American people. Our priest/warriors inaugurated an endless “shock and awe” crusade against the demons of this world, one that not only “keeps us free” but also effectively manages to separate the sheep from the goats, the saved from the damned—“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the divinized oracle uttered. The meaning of 911, thus, is this: the definitive, once-and-for-all, divine confirmation of “our” exceptional righteousness, and, concomitantly, the inexorable, irredeemable wickedness of the “other,” defined by magisterial fiat as anyone not willing to worship American power. Of course, Americans had some faith in the truth of this meaning before 911, but only on 911 was that faith confirmed and vindicated, seemingly by God Himself, using as his divine sign demonic planes crashing into our tallest shrines, while the pontifix maximus placidly meditated on his sacred scriptures, The Pet Goat, read upside down in an elementary school temple.

For Marvin and Ingle, death in war—what is commonly called the “ultimate sacrifice” for the nation—is what periodically re-presents the sense of belonging upon which the imagined nation is built. Such death is then elaborately ceremonialized in liturgies involving the flag and other ritual objects. Indeed, it is the ritual itself that retrospectively classifies any particular act of violence as sacrifice. Ritual gesture and language are crucial for establishing meaning and public assent to the foundational story being told. The foundational story is one of both creation and salvation. At the ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994, for example, President Clinton remarked of the soldiers that died there both that “They gave us our world” and that “They saved the world.”

.William Cavanaugh writes:

The public shrine has been emptied of any one particular God or creed, so that the government can never claim divine sanction and each person may be free to worship as she sees fit . . . . There is no single visible idol, no golden calf, to make the idolatry obvious . . . officially the shrine remains empty. . . . The empty shrine, however, threatens to make a deity not out of God but out of our freedom to worship God.  Our freedom comes to occupy the empty shrine. Worship becomes worship of our collective self, and civil religion tends to marginalize the worship of the true God.  Our freedom, finally, becomes the one thing we will die and kill for.

“You may confess on your lips any god you like, provided you are willing to kill for America.” And now France has officially joined itself to America’s sacred War of Terror.

Since 911, individual liberty in America has been vastly curtailed, and global violence has exponentially increased. Wars and rumors of wars abound. Perhaps the next staged, false-flag terror event will trigger the final annihilation of our freedoms and the complete establishment of a global police state, if we aren’t nuked out of existence first. The apocalypse seems to be upon us. So, what should we do—now? No doubt we should do all we can to restrict the scope and power of modern states and international institutions of global governance, as well as expose the machinations of the “deep state” that actually rules us. We must preserve what is left of the freedoms of speech, protest, and worship by non-violent means, and by self-defensive force if necessary.  Moreover, if our analysis is correct and modernity is merely the replacement of one bloody sacred for another—we used to have bloody crusades and wars for Christ and Mohammad, now we have them for democracy and freedom—it would seem reasonable for us to turn our efforts towards banishing any semblance of the sacred from the public square so as to separate it from all corrupting, political, coercive, and violence-making power and thus corruption. This would protect both the sacred from profanation and the state from idolatry. In other words, if Western governments are indeed shrines and purveyors of satanic nothing-worship, then we need to strip them of all sacred authority and power. Wasn’t this precisely the intent of the American Founders and the First Amendment?

While it cannot be denied that a more secular, less powerful, and more—much more—decentralized government-military-financial-educational-intelligence-media complex is the sine qua non of any solution, if we take the reality and power of the sacred as seriously as it deserves, we should be as discontented at seeing the sacred remain merely a private affair as we are seeing it counterfeited, mocked, and profaned. God exercises, whether we recognize it or not, social, cultural, and political reign over the world—we live now in a theocracy, always have, and always will, until the end of the world. And this rule is not just over individual hearts, but over institutions and states, over men organized collectively for the common good and for His honor, even if they dishonor Him and order the sacred commons to their monstrous, vampirish appetites. He is the ultimate common good, the ultimate ground for any human social contract, and if He is relegated to the private sphere of idiosyncratic and irrational fancy, something not-so-good will always take His place. Just as there is no such thing as free speech, there is no such thing as an empty shrine. 

Thus, we must work not only to dethrone the satanic sacred, the Abomination of Desolation now residing in the Holy of Holies, but also to replace it with the authentic sacred, the worship of the Living, Holy, All-powerful, All-knowing, All-just, All-merciful God. We need to learn, practice, revitalize, and establish in our communities and states those Traditions that embody and transmit His existence and will, that embody and mediate the ultimate realities of man’s existence, the transcendent origin, end, and meaning of all things that cannot be grasped by human reason alone, and which cannot be fully rationalized, defined, or articulated. Ultimate reality must be experienced and obeyed through and in its incarnations in authentic religious traditions. It is in this sense that genuine sacred traditions are the eyes that allow us desacralized men to see the spiritual, eternal, and transcendent meaning hidden in the physical, temporal, and mundane facts of everyday existence, to truly “delight in meaning” by being immersed in the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We must replace the counterfeit and degrading meanings given to us by the satanic sacred with the truth. 

To dethrone the satanic sacred that has usurped the seats of earthly power in Western society, we first must repent of our own complicity in its rites and ceremonies. That complicity has much to do with accepting the scapegoating status-quo because it flatters, protects, and keeps us feeling comfortable, and refusing to speak truth to power out of fear. After a thorough examination of conscience, we must unmask the satanic face hiding right out in the open so as to help those blinded to its existence and horrific nature through the unholy fear it engenders, the tortuous psychological and spiritual deceptions it incessantly enacts, and its totalitarian control of public discourse. As Neil Kramer describes, “For the ordinary person, the primary power of Empire rests not in its might or cunning, but in its invisibility. People who are not mindful of its presence do not comprehend their conscious and spiritual incarceration.” 

Father Waldstein writes:

The City of God is founded on a love of God that leads its citizens to contempt for themselves, counting all earthly things as worthless. . . . Augustine argues that the temporal ought to be ordered to the eternal (Civ. Dei XIX,17), but that this ordering will never be achieved entirely harmoniously till the second coming of the Lord. For, there is a second city here on earth in addition to the city of God— the civitas terrena, the earthly city. This city is founded on a love of self to the contempt of God (Civ. Dei XIV,28). And these two cities are in conflict . . . The earthly city is always opposed to true religion. . . . Justice consists in giving each his own, thus no society is just that does not give God the worship due to Him.

The city of man has always been opposed to true religion, to the truly sacred, and this opposition has only increased in our “secular age,” and exponentially since 911. At the heart of every culture is always the sacred, and at the heart of our post-911, pathocratic, imperial culture of death and deception is a terrible—but entirely vincible—sacred power in mortal conflict with the Logos, the merciful, loving, and truly sacred Person who protects, guide, and saves those who are willing to recognize, adore, and trust in Him.

In conclusion:

As Orestes Brownson maintained in the 19th century, the American project or ordered liberty and religious freedom could not succeed in the absence of a majority of Catholic citizens. He was correct. But I would go a step further than Brownson and claim that the American project cannot succeed unless Catholicism, or at least a generic theism based upon a true overlapping consensus that includes the natural law as an authority (as a start) replace the incoherent liberalism we have now and have had ab initio as the ultimate source of moral and political authority in the state. 

Without some sort of integrally implemented confessional state Christian model, England, or America, cannot be saved from its continual fall into decadence. We can move towards this by establishing some measure of legal and political autonomy for small-scale tradition-constituted communities, little polises, as it were, that can be held together by a federal alliance based upon a consensus on practical, natural-law based norms, something I articulate in more detail at the end of my book The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophy Can’t Solve It. Any confessional political order would, of course, have to emerge organically and by steps, and it would, of course, presuppose a widespread conversion to traditional Christianity. One might call this utopian, but the proper end must be seen and loved in order for us to act prudently and effectively, not to mention righteously.

As Brad Gregory has so magnificently recounted in his The Unintended Reformation, the Protestant Revolutionaries denied fundamental truths declared by the infallible teaching authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, and they denied the capacity of her custodians and all faithful Christians to be certain of her possession of the truth. They supplanted this ecclesial and magisterial authority and certainty with sola scriptura, an inexorably subjective, "from the inside,” and thus incoherent conduit to definitive and saving knowledge about Christ. The Enlightenment liberals, stuck in ecclesial subjectivism, epistemological reductionism, and ontological nominalism, then attempted to build something objective on this subjectivist sand, and supplanted the Bible with "reason." The post-modernists then supplanted reason with "irony," and “narrative,” in short, the authoritative “truth" that there is no access to universal truth about reality, let alone the will of God, or at least no way to know that one has access to it. 

And at the end of this line of revolutionaries, we find ideologues like the Catholic Anthony Kennedy, as well as those Catholics and Christians who, though explicitly renouncing ecclesial subjectivism, nominalism, and liberalism, speak and act in practice as though the Catholic Church were just, politically speaking, a private sect, that the truths of the natural and Divine Positive law should never have any privileged authority in guiding and justifying law, and that the American experiment would be a success if only Catholics, Christians, and other men of good were virtuous, active, and sufficiently educated, that is, with no need for any restructuring of the regime in light of Catholic social teaching, the philosophia perennis, and the natural law.

Solutions to separation of Church and state?

But as the Nietzschean Stanley Fish has demonstrated, the proper separation of Church and state is, in a word, impossible—if it is to be accomplished within and according to liberalism and the liberal nation state, and this includes, as Michael Hanby has shown, the classical liberalism of the American Founders, however much better this form of liberalism was than what we have now. And if this is true, it would explain why there is no good and rationally coherent solution to the Kim Davis issue. Within the intellectual, moral, legal, and political constraints of the contemporary American regime, a regime that is and cannot help not being utterly incoherent on the relations of Church and state, the just separation of Church and state is, as it were, mission impossible. Either Davis goes to jail, or she is permitted to abstain from signing the licenses with her name, or some compromise is made. But whichever is determined by official coercive power, it is not, and cannot be, a rational determination.

Insofar as the American regime, both on the federal and local levels, constitutionally and legally prescinds in its legal and political deliberations from any consideration of the moral and political and theological claims of the Catholic Church, as well as of the authority of the natural law, of which she is the unique and authoritative custodian; and precludes other citizens from considering these authorities in those arguments and debates in the public square, in Congress, in the Senate, in the Supreme Court, and in any other forum where argument and debate can ensue in law, it renders itself incapable of resolving fundamental political issues, let alone ones that bear upon the supernatural realm, the Church’s rights and privileges, and the authority of God.

And this is so because, ultimately, only Jesus Christ has the authority to settle the just bounds between Church and state—because he is the author of both. By the fact of his Incarnation, he brought together Church and state, heaven and earth, divinity and humanity for the first time. And after bringing them together, he commanded their proper separation: "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." Therefore, in order to know we owe Caesar and God today, we must listen to his authentic and infallible mouthpiece—which isn’t the Supreme Court or conservative court sophists. Unless we have access to the voice of Christ, Fish is right—there is no way of solving the problem. It is mission impossible.

Yet, there must be a solution because Christ commanded us to solve the problem. In short, Christ must have given us a sure and "from the outside" way of determining his will regarding the proper ordering of Church and state. Anything but a living, visible, unified, universal, hierarchical, concrete, corporal institution whose unity, holiness, universality, and apostolicity is recognizable by all "from the outside" cannot afford humans the clear determination of Christ's will in matters of political, as well as any other matter. Anything less would inevitably perpetuate both the denial of access, and the subjective uncertainty of that access to the definitive truth regarding Christ's will for the proper ordering of the political order vis-à-vis religion in general, and the Church in particular, a denial and uncertainty that would make the just separation of the prerogatives of Church and state impossible, and would thus make a just resolution to particular conflicts between Church and state impossible, such as the Kim Davis conflict. What we would have is either outright civil war, or what we have now, the Procrustean attempt to make the message of the Gospel fit into the arbitrary will of whoever happens to be ruling in the state. In short, chaos or a hopelessly compromised Christianity, or both. And this is indeed what we have.

No one but God can define his Church and her relationship with the state; no man is God but Christ; and no one can authoritatively speak for Christ other than his One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Only she has absolute freedom of conscience and religion; only she has been authorized to speak for God on what belongs to him, but all baptized Christians in communion with her participate in this right. Kim Davis doesn’t know any of this, but she does know that what belongs to God—and not the state—is her immortal soul, and she has acted accordingly. Would that those who know better than she about matters theological and spiritual would do the same.          

Kale Zelden and Larry Chapp are highly educated and high-cultured Magisterium-obeying Catholic academics and influencers—and based upon their social media remarks, they utterly despise fellow Catholic influencer Candace Owens. Zelden has even written a blog post in which he characterizes Candace as a literal witch. One reason for their hatred is that Candace is the most influential challenger of the official story of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which they both purport to believe. She is not as credentialed or high-cultured as they are, yet more popular and influential, so that’s another reason they hate her. They are envious.

As is obvious to anyone aware that all official narratives involving violent or trauamtic events (JFK, IXXI, Covid, etc.) are lies, and has thus done his own research, Charlie Kirk was murdered by Mossad, the FBI, and TPUSA in a professional hit, including a patsy, Tyler Robinson, and a sophisticated and coordinated psychological operation to imprint an obviously false and absurd narrative on the minds of as many people as possible. And he was murdered because he had recently recognized that his wife was a liar and most probably a Mossad agent, that Israel was an evil regime, and that war with Iran would be evil—and he, an extremely influential and persuasive public speaker, was about to go public with these views. Just like the absurdity of the official narratives of the JFK assasination, the IXXI attacks, and the Scamdemic, the official narrative of Tyler Robinson having shot Charlie Kirk with a .30-06 rifle from a far-away rooftop because Kirk was opposed to “leftism,” is patently absurd, but that the Emperor is obviously naked doesn’t prevent those with a vested interest in him being viewed as clothed from declaring him as such, whether they believe him to be clothed or not.

So, what interest, Larry and Kale, do y ou have in the ridiculous official story being believed by others? And do you even believe it? Is it your Zionism, or is it how siding with an unlettered and popular, anti-zionist black woman who has taken on the most evil people to ever exist—and is winning—would make you look in front of your elitist audience? Is it the continuing effects on your large brains of the IXXI brainwashing psy-op against “conspiracy theories”? Is it your envy? Is it all of these?

Whatever your explanation, gentlemen, by attacking and calumniating Candace, you have added to the poisonous rhetorical climate in which an innocent man being murdered by the State with no clear evidence against him appears acceptable and just. By aiming to discredit this man’s most powerful, righteous, courageous, and truth-telling advocate, you will be complicit if he is murdered. Repent of your malice towards Candace, your envy, your worldly attachments, your Zionism, and your cowardice, and defend Candace, even if it means you lose some of your precious prestige and have to admit you were wrong, really wrong.

Live not by Lies

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

—Hannah Arendt

Let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam it shut right now. . . . If only it were so simple! If only it were true that there exist evil people insidiously committing evil deeds, whom it is necessary simply to separate out and destroy. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. . . .

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our next text was an abridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag Archipelago is not merely a journalistic report of what happened. It is the most exquisite artistic rendering in words possible of the lived reality of the Gulag, a synthesis of the experiences of 256 witnesses to the Soviet camps, including narratives, letters, memoirs, and other eyewitness accounts, as well as his own first-hand experience of prison, camp, and exile. It includes historical discussions, personal reminiscences, political reflections, and philosophical meditations. Reading Solzhenitsyn’s words is as close as one can get to actually experiencing the Gulag.

Americans en masse had never experienced totalitarianism in their own country until 2020, when it was installed globally under the cover of an alleged worldwide pandemic. My students experienced it, and suffered much during it, but they were too young at the time to grasp what was happening. But then again, the vast majority of people, regardless of age, didn’t grasp what was happening then and still don’t today. They probably never will. And it was the same in Solzhenitsyn’s time. It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole world was turned into a Gulag between the years of 2020 and 2023, especially at the height of the “lockdowns,” and particularly in certain countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, and China, and in certain U.S. cities, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the lockdowns and other forms of violent coercion and oppression weren’t the worst aspect of the Covid Gulag, just as the physical violence wasn’t the greatest evil in the Soviet Gulag, as Solzhenitsyn indicates in his 1974 essay, released on the day he was arrested, “Live not by Lies”:

When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

The root evil of totalitarianism is not its systematic infliction of mass violence, enslavement, and murder, but its mass corruption of souls through the systematic infliction of lies. The human person is most corrupted when it betrays its most sacred obligation and purpose, to know and love the truth, and totalitarianism is founded upon, fueled by, and ordered to this very betrayal. It is successful when its victims internalize, regurgitate, and bless its lies—in the case of Soviet totalitarianism, the God-and-soul-denying lies of Marxist-Leninism:

• That society could be transformed and perfected through the abolition of private property, the family, religion, and the nation;

• That mass torture and murder were not aberrations or violations of socialist legality but the direct commands of the ideology;

• That lying in workplaces, schools, and public life is the new normal;

• The distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is in reality only the one between “progress” and “reaction.”

Totalitarianism reaches its consummation when the masses participate in, endorse, and obey its lies as they are embodied in counterfeit social practices, norms, rituals, and laws. Its mass physical violence and oppression, as evil as these are, are just the means to the much greater evil of spiritual violence and oppression, which culminates in the masses violating and oppressing their own souls. This is the central message of Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book.

The western democracies of the “free world” either never got the message or forgot it, for in 2020, a new and actually global totalitarianism emerged in the West, replete with mass violence and murder, though cleverly cloaked as “health measures,” along with a new set of lies and evil social pratices, norms, rituals, and laws that were successfully internalized, regurgitated, participatred in, and blessed by the vast majority of the people of the world, lies and practices such as:

• Universal and objective reality about health is nothing but the declarations and dictates of self-and-state-appointed “experts” and “knowers.” Thus, official claims and pronouncements regarding health are always true, and dictates from “public health experts” must be obeyed without question.

• Healthy people with no symptoms of illness are actually sick, indeed, contagious and deadly walking diseases.

• The human face and breath are abominations to be covered and suffocated.

• Getting injected with an untested and experimental serum is a moral obligation, and goverments should coerce compliance.

• Children should be tortured (mask wearing for seven hours a day, even outside and when playing) and sacrificed (injections known to be harmful and even deadly that they never needed) for the comfort of “at risk” adults and whenever we are told that “public health” requires it.

We now know (though many still refuse or are unable to see) that the “Covid 19 Pandemic” was nothing other than the infliction of global totalitarianism based upon deliberate, malicious, and coordinated lies, that “the science” was a code word for these lies, and that virtually everyone in power, from the global elites to local school boards, was lying. Ceteris paribus, the same evil that took over Russia in 1918 took over the world in 2020, aiming first at the replacement of spiritual, metaphysical, and moral reality with diabolical counterfeits, and then finally at obtaining the masses’ consent to and endorsement of this replacement, to commit en masse the greatest possible treason against God and their own souls.

Reading The Gulag Archipelago in light of the recent experience of the Covid Gulag, and interpreting the latter in the light of the former, we are disposed to learning what Solzhenitsyn has to teach us about the evil of totalitarianism:

In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there rotting on prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years. And even within the hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an un-uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions on the world. They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions of history: they destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

“She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Flannery O’Connor was our next author, and we read three of her short stories: A Good Man is Hard to Find, Revelation, and Good Country People. In the next post, I will discuss her teaching on evil.

Williamson’s sermons, meanwhile, had been widening out over the months into something less like homilies and more like a weekly map of an enemy order. The Freemasons had infiltrated the Vatican. International Jewry had financed the Bolshevik revolution. The Communists had placed agents inside the American seminaries in the 1950s. The Sound of Music was “sentimental hogwash.” Pants on women were “a modernist ploy to erase the God-given order between men and women.”

—Louis Massett, Traddyland

Dear reactionary anti-trad:

You say you’re now skeptical about conspiracy theories because the trads you used to associate with believed in them, but you use that term, “conspiracy theorist,” which shows you’re a bit brainwashed by the media. And you also naively accept the official conspiracy theory of 911, which is a completely insane account, as well as the official lie about the Kirk military assassination operation, which is also an insane story, and you aren’t skeptical of these. You disparage Candace Owens like you’re programmed to do. You’re not the critical thinker you think you are.

You can’t understand geopolitics if you don’t know that 911 was a Mossad CIA false flag, as well as JFK. Fuentes is probably a CIA asset, so what he says about anything doesn’t count.

Do you also accept the scamDemic lies? I wrote a book about this. Enroute Press, a very anti trad operation, published it. My review of Andrew Mioni’s anti-trad book is linked on their website, so you know I’m no trad. I’m also classically educated with a doctorate in philosophy from a Pontifical University, so I’m no dummy.

The problem with trads, as you know, is inner circle gnosticism and tribal group think. But, reacting emotionally against this you just have ended up in another tribal group-think paradigm. The truth is found without reaction or group-think loyalty through dialectical dedication to the truth.

As Catholics, we need to be able to be prudent, and that requires knowing basic geopolitical truths, not all of them, but some. JFK, 911, Israel, scamDemic, Charlie Kirk are essential psyops that one needs to know the truth about enough not to allow oneself to be lied to and thus manipulated. We have an obligation not to believe lies and not allow ourselves to be lied to. Such basic knowledge, which doesn’t require rabbit hole excesses, is required to attend well to one’s duty of state.

You seem still to be in PTSD reaction mode from trad trauma and so you can’t see straight on some things. Don’t let your trauma cause you to throw courageous Catholics like Candace Owens under the bus. And don’t ever put your need to fit into and please your tribe over the Truth. That’s a sin.

There are only two paths in life, the one that leads to heaven and the one that leads to hell. And there are only two modes of living, salvation and well-being.  One must live in the mode of salvation to end up in heaven, and the mode of well-being can only lead to hell. Heaven begins on earth when one pursues salvation, and hell is right here for those who pursue well-being. One cannot live in both modes, as they are mutually exclusive, though one can live in one and then another. It is the mode that one persists in unto the end that determines eternity. It is not that well-being is hell per se, for it is a good, though not the ultimate one, and the fruit of living the mode of salvation is true well-being in this life, the most that is possible on earth, a life of sometimes agonizing and unspeakable suffering, surely, but also ineffable peace, supernal joy, and indomitable hope. Living in God’s Divine Will is heaven itself, and it begins now. And it culminates in eternity with the most well-being possible to a creature, complete union with God. So, well-being is good, but if we seek it and not God as our main goal in this life, if it is our primary existential mode, with salvation taking a back seat, we obtain neither well-being nor salvation.

What exactly do I mean by salvation and well-being, and why are they mutually exclusive? In a fascinating 1970s book entitled Marriage: Dead or Alive, the twentieth-century Swiss Jungian psychiatrist Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig explained that marriage was failing more than ever before because it was mistakenly portrayed and understood in the mode of well-being, where in truth it is a relationship and institution grounded in and ordered to salvation, only succeeding when understood and lived out as such. About well-being vs salvation, he writes:

Clearly not belonging to the state of well-being are tensions, dissatisfactions, painful emotions, anxiety, hatred, difficult and insoluble internal and external conflicts, obsessive searching for an undiscoverable truth, confused struggles about God, and the felt need to come to terms with evil and death. Sickness most certainly does not belong to the state of well-being. It is much easier, at any rate, for physically and psychologically healthy people to enjoy a sense of well-being than it is for the sick. “Give us our daily bread” really implies, “Give us daily our sense of well-being.”. . . As goals, salvation and well-being contradict each other. The path to happiness does not necessarily include suffering. For the sake of our well-being, we are urged to be happy and not to break our heads with questions that have no answer. A happy person sits at the family table among loved ones and enjoys a hearty meal. A person who seeks salvation wrestles with God, the Devil, and the world, and confronts death, even if all of this is not absolutely necessary at that precise moment.

The mode of salvation was modeled perfectly for us in the life of Jesus Christ, and it is only by following His model that we can attain our soul’s salvation, but it is not that the salvation mode of life only became known to us by the Incarnation. It was known to the ancient Jews as well as the pagans, and it is known to today’s Jews, Muslims, pagans, and secular humanists, for it is a fundamental part of natural human consciousness. Those who prefer this mode over the mode of well-being, and live it unto the end, are saved, regardless of what they know or do not know about Jesus Christ, unless, of course, they reject Him knowingly and deliberately. But if they are truly living within the mode of salvation, they will never do that.

A good pagan example of the two modes in contrast is found in the two heroes of Homer’s epics, Achilles and Odysseus. Achilles is given a choice to live a long life of well-being or a short life of salvation. The mode of salvation for the warrior was a life of valor on the battlefield, seeking honor and glory more than the mere preservation of one’s life. Achilles fulfilled this mode excellently until he was deprived of the honor he deserved by King Agamemnon. Achilles reacted with a superhuman rage and offense at this affront, and this not mainly because his war-trophy bride, Briseis, was taken from him, but more because he was destined before birth to have been the new Zeus, but was deprived of this by Zeus himself. According to a Pindaric tradition, Thetis, at the behest of Zeus, acceded to marriage with the mortal Peleus instead of Zeus in order to avert the birth of a son who would be stronger than his father. Achilles would have surpassed Zeus if his mother had not consented to a marriage beneath her divine status that neutralized the threat he constituted to Zeus’s order. Achilles knew this, and so harbored in the recesses of his soul an infinite desire for divine power and glory that could never be satisfied, as well as an infinite divine rage at this existential frustration. This is an excellent image of the desire all humans have for divinization, along with the nagging sense that we were all destined for greatness but somehow lost it, and the ineradicable feeling of futility, dissatisfaction, and guilt with a mere life of well-being. Until Jesus came, we had no real ground for hope that our infinite longings could ever be fulfilled, yet some before Christ, such as faithful Hebrews and noble pagans, still chose to live in the mode of salvation, somehow knowing they were obliged to do so even without a grounded hope in an eventual successful end. Getting back to Achilles, when he was dishonored by Agamemnon, a mere mortal, it was as if his whole raison d’etre was destroyed, and he chose to leave the battle and live the mode of well-being in his tent, hanging out with his friends and playing music. When some of the Greek leaders come to his tent to try to convince him to rejoin the battle, Achilles says:

Neither Agamemnon nor any other Greek will change my mind, for it seems there is no gratitude for ceaseless battle with our enemies. He who fights his best and he who stays away earn the same reward, the coward and the brave man win like honor, death comes alike to the idler and to him who toils. No profit to me from my sufferings, endlessly risking my life in war.

Here Achilles reveals the mode of well-being he has recently adopted, with its irrefutable logic of the futility of a life pursuing salvation. For those living at the time of the Trojan War, 1200 BC or so, the afterlife in the underworld was a shadowy thing, neither punishment nor reward but a flittering, ghostlike, and passionless existence, barely alive, with no drama or purpose. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and is told by him that it is so lame that it is better to be a slave on the earth than to rule Hades, in other words, that there is no reason to pursue the life of salvation. But somehow, in spite of the nihilistic yet airtight well-being logic he entertains for a moment—what good is it to be a warrior if in death all are equal, and equally half-dead?—Achilles knows that a life of honor and courage and death-defying valor is obligatory for him and that it violates a primordial, cosmic law for him to allow his fellow Greeks to die dishonorably, and so when his best friend Patroclus dies in battle due to his wallowing in well-being despair, he re-establishes himself in salvation mode and kicks much Trojan butt with some god-designed armor descended from heaven and a shield that contains the whole cosmos, signifying that the way of salvation, and not the way of well-being, is written into the very fabric of things. And he dies soon after by getting shot by an arrow in his heel.

Odysseus lived the salvation mode until, on his way home from Troy, he is waylaid by a nymph goddess, Calypso, who “traps” him on her island for seven years. I put trap in scare quotes because in the less-literal yet more accurate reading, Odysseus was free to leave anytime he wanted, and it was just the case that he did not want to, as he now had a matchless goddess as a very willing wife, one who also shared her immortality with him. But her name means “she who conceals,” and the price he had to pay for his well-being on steroids was never again to be seen and known, and perhaps to have his life up till then never sung by bards to the future generations of Greeks. Somehow he knew (when he got the seven-year itch) that risking abominable suffering in unknown waters populated by horrendous monsters with a very uncertain prospect of ever getting home alive was worth more than an eternity of perfect, earthly well-being. So, he put on the helmet of salvation, as it were, built a raft, and eventually sang his own song on the island of the Phaeacians, a paradisal mecca of well-being whose king also invited him to renounce his salvation, marry his beautiful daughter, and stay forever with them before sailing him (almost) home on a magic ship.

My last example from the ancient world is Job. According to the theology of his day, which was probably after the Flood but well before Moses, those who followed God’s law were blessed with a life of well-being, and this was a reason as good as any other to do so. If one did not experience well-being—health, long life, wealth, and a big family with lots of land and flocks—it meant that one was not following God too well, and deserved not to have it. But this was a mistaken notion of the economy of God and the true purpose for following Him, as Job was to discover. Satan challenged God by saying, essentially: “The only reason anyone ‘loves’ you and doesn’t curse you is because you reward them with well-being. Take away their well-being, and see what happens. You talk about salvation all the time. Well, they never really choose it, if it even exists. There is only well-being disguised as salvation.” God takes away all the well-being from Job, and his counselors tell him to repent of his sin. They are firmly in the well-being mode. Perhaps Job was as well at some time or another, but he meditated for a while on the dung heap, and he was now in salvation mode, as he cried, “I know my redeemer lives.” How did he know that? Everyone in the salvation mode knows it, for it is somehow knowing it that puts one into that mode. He eventually was given his well-being back, just as Jesus was resurrected, but an intimate meeting with the unknowable God was what he wanted all along, and he got it, in a terrifying whirlwind cross-examination that almost killed him. He didn’t get a comprehensible and satisfying answer to the mystery of suffering, as the mode of well-being would expect. What he got was confirmation that salvation is not at all about human well-being or the lack of it, or even being just or unjust or pious or impious. It’s something way beyond even morality, however essential that is. It’s about God, period. As St. Louis de Montfort often said: “God alone.”

Why not just call these modes religious or non-religious, or even Christian or non-Christian? It is because those who practice religion and identify as such are not necessarily living the mode of salvation, and those who say they are not religious are not necessarily living the mode of well-being. People can say they believe in God and actually practice worship and seem to live for Him while living completely or mainly in the mode of well-being, and people can say that they don’t believe or care about God or spiritual matters, and appear not to, while living completely or mainly in the salvation mode. It seems to me that the well-being/salvation modes are more fundamental and definitive than the religious/non-religious labels. For, they are existential and primary, residing and operating in the deepest recesses of the heart and the will. Before we consciously choose to act at any specific time in any particular way, we have always-already chosen, as it were, one of these modes, and our choices from then on are derivative from and caused by that primordial choice. Why we choose one mode or the other and persist in it is ultimately a mystery, but I would still like to say something about it later on.

We live within a global culture of well-being, an elite-imposed and artificial, totalitarian therapeutic prison, and this means that through an inexorable, ineluctable, and inescapable cultural conditioning process, well-being is the default position of the collective consciousness. Charles Taylor calls it the Immanent Frame. We are meant by our puppeteer conditioners to know of nothing other. If we do not deliberately fight to resist and escape this conditioning, it will mold and poison our souls unconsciously. But even if we somehow become acquainted while within this prison with the salvific mode of consciousness, through, say, encountering traditional religion or reading classic literature or meeting a living saint, we are programmed to translate this experience into the discourse, grammar, and social-imaginary of well-being, thereby turning it into its opposite.

If the reader is still wondering what exactly the modes of well-being and salvation are, that’s ok, for I am as well. It’s not possible to nail them down in precise language. They are too big and deep for language. The particular mode of thought, cast of concepts, and exigency of language we happen now to understand and employ derives from and is constituted by one of these modes or the other. There is no third. If we are in the mode of well-being, we see the world that way, and we will not only not understand the mode of salvation, we will despise it. Furthermore, we will not even recognize that we are in a mode at all—it is just the way things are. One has to be in the mode of salvation to understand that experiential modes even exist, and then to understand the nature of each mode and their radical opposition. For, these two modes determine exhaustively the very contours of the meaning of life itself, as they are the earthly images of the two modes of eternity. Thus, it must not be expected that they can be discretely and definitively defined in this life. They can be described, pointed to, adumbrated, suggested, intuited, exemplified, metaphorized, allegorized, unveiled, demarcated, translated, and cartographed—but never exhaustively grasped. It is these modes, after all, that define us. Nevertheless, I intend to keep describing and attempting to define them as we proceed, hopefully with increasing lucidity.

This is the clearest definition I can think of at the moment: The mode of well-being is a living hell that leads to eternal hell. The mode of salvation is a living heaven that leads to eternal heaven. And here is the most compelling reason I can think of why this is the case: Hell is the choice for the complete absence of God, Who is ultimate reality. Hell is thus the choice for ultimate unreality. Thus, the mode of well-being chosen in this life is a life of perpetual and absolute war with ultimate reality.

Is putting oneself under false authority really so bad? Yes, it is the worst sin possible. It is the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus said is unforgivable. It is calling good evil and evil good. Salvation comes from putting oneself under the authority of Truth, Who is Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, Who was with God in the beginning and is God. Damnation comes from putting yourself under the authority of untruth, whose father is Satan, the father of lies, who was a liar and murderer from the beginning. And it is this that distinguishes the mode of well-being from the mode of salvation. In well-being, one puts truth second to everything else. Truth is never first.

Perhaps it is an authority, but it is never the authority. In salvation, truth is always first. It is Authority, period. One strives for well-being, for we are permitted to do so, but it is always a striving for well-being in the light of and under the authority of truth. And if believing in and obeying the truth means that one’s earthly well-being is sacrificed, then so be it. Salvation comes first. Salvation means eternal well-being, which is all that matters. Earthly well-being is a good, and those who live in the mode of salvation obtain it in its essence, which is joy and peace in union with God in this life, which no one can take away. Sometimes this joy and peace are accompanied by worldly goods, such as financial prosperity and bodily health and good reputation. But sometimes not. And it doesn’t matter one way or the other for the salvation-minded. Obedience to truth is all that matters. For the well-being-minded, a feeling of well-being is all that matters, and knowing and obeying truth is, at best, only a means to this highest end.

There has never been a time in the history of the human race in which the mode of salvation has been more eclipsed and difficult to live out, and the mode of well-being more pronounced, seductive, irresistible, ubiquitous, and easy to practice, than today. One might think of the time before Christ as comparable or even worse than now, but consider that the corruption of the best is the worst, that nothing could be worse than a counterfeit of salvation replacing the true one, and such could only be possible after the historical manifestation of the full salvific truth of Jesus Christ. What we have today is much worse than paganism, and much worse than even the most corrupt and “dark” of post-Incarnation ages of years past. What we have is a culture of well-being that wears the mask of salvation, with the salvation mode practically counterfeited out of existence. Even the best of the salvation-mode sub-cultures are more or less compromised and tainted by the ubiquitous well-being culture, and they easily end up becoming mirror images of it, appearing to be solidly salvific but surreptitiously and subtly counterfeit. They talk salvation but walk well-being.

Human beings were created by God for happiness in the worship of God. For reasons entirely inscrutable to human beings (all of the best reasons that have been offered cannot adequately explain it), God decided to make this happiness a personal choice for which we are responsible. This means that humans can choose not to worship God, that is, choose unhappiness over happiness. Why would a human being choose unhappiness and reject the very reason he was created? No one knows the answer to this question, for it is a mystery, the unfathomable and inscrutable mystery of evil. All we know is that we cannot escape this choice. Whether we obtain eternal happiness in the worship of God or eternal unhappiness in the refusal of this worship is entirely up to us, and any of us is capable of choosing against his own happiness. If you end up in hell for all eternity, it is because you wanted while alive and want now to be there. You refused to worship God, and you did so knowing it would mean eternal hell, and you chose it anyway.

What does the choice for hell look like? The Catholic and Orthodox Churches teach that if we die in a state of unrepentance, in a state of “mortal sin,” we go to hell. What is it to commit a mortal sin, and what does a state of unrepentance look like? Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” and “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” At its core, mortal sin is the refusal to know and obey truth, which is to say, to reject reality, for truth is the conformity of our souls with reality. At the core of reality is the Good, which is reality qua desirable. And since Jesus Christ is the truth, reality incarnate, then every refusal of reality, refusal to know and obey truth, is a rejection of Jesus, the Incarnate Good. Unrepentance means that we persist up to the moment of death in this rejection in the knowledge that we are choosing hell because of it. We end in up hell if we persist in our rejection of reality, truth, and Jesus Christ.

Why would anyone reject reality and truth and the Good and Jesus Christ? The obvious answer is due to a mistake. For whatever reason, we are not in a right relationship with reality and so misunderstand the truth about it. We reject what we do not know is truth. This is certainly possible, but why do we not know the truth? We are personally responsible for the relationship we have with reality up the point at which we die, and if it is not a right one, it is ultimately our fault. Not knowing something is the truth at one time or another can certainly be the fault of someone else whom we depend on for knowing what is true, such as a parent or a teacher or a culture, but this is a temporary and remediable situation. The injustice done to our souls by false authorities may not be our fault, but we have the ability and responsibility to recognize and rectify this injustice. Even though it is the case that reality is mediated to us by human authorities that could be mistaken or lying about the truth, and mediated by our own faculties of knowing that might be, due to ourselves or others, damaged or faulty, this does not excuse us from the personal responsibility of ensuring that we are in a correct relationship with reality and thus know what is true. And we have the responsibility of not only knowing what is true, but also loving and obeying it. If we did not have this responsibility, hell would not exist, for we would always have a legitimate excuse that rendered us not personally responsible for our not knowing and not loving truth. There would be no real guilt.

How do we overcome the damage done to our souls by others and ourselves that has caused us, right now, not to be in a right relationship with reality and thus not to know or love what is true? If we are dependent on others for knowing certain truths, and even for the development in us, especially when we are young, of the habit of being docile to truth, how do we overcome this dependency when it has led us into a soul-state of untruth? The answer is that we are always able to choose between well-being, in which truth isn’t a priority, and salvation, where it is the only priority, regardless of how badly we might have been damaged. Indeed, if we had always chosen salvation over well-being, we would not be so damaged right now in the first place, for when in a state of salvation, we are quite immune to the damage done to our souls by the truth-treason of others. The problem is, of course, that we were not and are not now fully in a state of salvation, and so have been seriously damaged. But we can begin to undo this damage by choosing, right now, to live in the salvation mode, and we can keep choosing this until the moment we die.

Consider the situation of a Pharisee at the time of Christ. He was badly damaged by the culture in which he was raised, for it was thoroughly corrupt, even though its laws were first given to the Jews by God Himself. Jesus gives a very clear picture of this culture:

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean. . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.  So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

Imagine being raised as a Pharisee in this culture. It was now a culture of well-being, not salvation, even though it was given to the Jews directly by God to be one of salvation. No Pharisee was forced to participate in this corrupt culture, for he still had some access to uncorrupted scriptures and traditions. He could have resisted the corruption and even called it out, as Jesus did, but this would have required consistently being in and acting from the mode of salvation, which would have been quite difficult with all the pressure to and rewards from being in the mode of well-being masking as the mode of salvation. Who was modeling salvation for them? No one. It was the opposite. Everyone was modeling Satan, whom Jesus called their father. But Jesus, the perfect embodiment of the uncorrupted scriptures and tradition, was now present in their midst; now they had a model and thus the ability to compare themselves to the Good and see and repent of their evil. He made their evil quite clear to them, and there was no reason not to believe Him, for He had no hypocrisy in Him, and He spoke to them in love and from the mode of salvation—and He performed miracles. Perhaps before Jesus came they had some excuse for their evil, but not now.

All a Pharisee had to do was to pose one question to himself: “Is He the evil one, or is it I?” This is a question anyone at any time can ask, and it is a question evoked by the existential mode of salvation, a mode anyone at any time can adopt in the deepest recesses of his soul. Saul became Paul when he adopted this mode and asked this question, a question prompted by a shocking mystical encounter with the Risen Lord that knocked him to the ground and left him physically blind. God will always provide the precise experiences we need to get into the salvation mode and begin asking salvific questions, but only if we first desire to exist in the mode by which such questions will be salvific for us. Saul must have desired this in the core of his being, and Jesus saw this and helped him to fulfill it. Jesus knew how evil the culture was that produced Saul the Christ-hating Pharisee, and He provided him a way out. Of course, the desire and ability to live in the salvific mode is itself a gift of God unmerited by us without which we could never be saved. But it is always offered and made available to us. We must simply choose it.

A good culture is one that forms its denizens to be in a right relationship to reality, causing the mind to know it and the will to love it. A good culture makes it easier to know and love truth, and a bad culture makes it harder. The Pharisee culture of the Jews in Saul’s day was a bad culture, for it disposed its leaders to reject Jesus Christ. The rejection of Jesus Christ is now  at the very heart of Western “woke” culture in our day. Our present culture makes it very easy not to know and love truth, to be irresponsible and unaccountable, for it makes it all but impossible and undesirable to ask questions from the mode of salvation, especially this question: “Is it true?” It thus makes it very easy to be, live, and act in the mode of well-being while thinking one is in the mode of salvation, or not even knowing that there is any other mode than well-being, or that one is in any “mode” at all. How can we be saved from this most perilous deception? Alasdair MacIntyre:

We have within our social order few if any social milieus within which reflective and critical enquiry concerning the central issues of human life can be sustained…. This tends to be a culture of answers, not of questions, and those answers, whether secular or religious, liberal or conservative, are generally delivered as though meant to put an end to questioning.

Paul Evdokimov:

The outdated religious person and the modern sophisticated irreligious individual meet back to back in an immanence imprisoned within itself…. The denial of God has thus permitted the affirmation of man. Once this affirmation is effected, there is no longer anything to be denied or subordinated… On this level total man will not be able to ask any questions concerning his own reality, just as God does not put a question to himself

Asking questions indicates a soul that is aware of her dignity as a responsible creature, personally responsible to know and obey the authority of truth, not human counterfeits of it. The totalitarians who want to rule us want us to degrade ourselves by choosing idols over God, and they want us to do so knowingly and deliberately. This is why they hate questions more than anything. The first step to obtaining their goal is to get us to stop asking questions and caring about the Truth. God is the answer to all questions. They want us to see them as God. If we stop asking questions about the claims and actions of any human being, we are obeying their satanic command. Origen once wrote: “Every true question is like the lance which pierces the side of Christ causing blood and water to flow forth.” It is the blood and water that saved the Centurion, and it will save us if we so desire it.

“It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human affairs.” —Daniel Webster

“Honor the Flag. America is freedom.” —from a bumper sticker

Can a Catholic be a patriotic American? The very question seems absurd, no doubt the rantings of some nineteenth-century Know-Nothing or one of his contemporary ideological descendants such as Jimmy Swaggart. But I am afraid that in their haste to assure the American public that the Know-Nothing harangues against Catholics were preposterous, our forefathers in the Faith may have been guilty of a failure to examine sufficiently what patriotism in America is all about anyway. Or, to go deeper still, what it exactly is we are called to be patriotic toward here in the U.S. Or, if we were to put the matter in theological terms, is their any necessary relation between the heresy of Americanism and the common patriotic idea of America?

Before one gets too excited by my raising the question of a possible conflict between ones duties as a Catholic and one’s patriotism, let me state the thesis that I will attempt to prove, and then see what sort of evidence I can bring forward in support. My thesis is simply this: That though there is never any real conflict between one’s duties to the Church of God and one’s duties as a citizen or subject of some temporal state, we here in America are in a strange position. This is because what is almost universally held to be patriotism in the U.S. is not loyalty to a nation but loyalty to an ideology, incarnated in this nation, to be sure, but essentially and primarily an idea, an idea which is regarded as important for the whole human race. Moreover, the history of America is viewed not merely as the history of a country, one among many, but as a sacred history with universal significance for all men, again, because it is the history of the establishment of the regime that embodies that idea or ideology.

There is ample evidence for this quasi-official belief. One of my favorites, and undoubtedly the most striking, is a quote attributed to the late Senator Hubert Humphrey: “America is not a piece of geography between two oceans and two borders. America is an idea....” This statement captures perfectly the reigning notion of patriotism in America, but one can also find the same or similar ideas in the speeches of those considered eminent among us, as the following show. Note also that these statements come from both those called liberals as well as those considered conservatives, Republicans as well as Democrats.

1. Daniel Webster, “A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” August 2, 1826:

It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of. America, America, our country, fellow-citizens, our own dear and native land, is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have maintained them. Let us contemplate, then, this connection, which binds the prosperity of others to our own; and let us manfully discharge all the duties which it imposes. If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, Heaven will assist us to carry on the work of human liberty and human happiness.

2. James K. Polk, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1845:

Who shall assign limits to the achievements of free minds and free hands under the protection of this glorious Union? No treason to mankind since the organization of society would be equal in atrocity to that of him who would lift his hand to destroy it. He would overthrow the noblest structure of human wisdom, which protects himself and his fellow-man. He would stop the progress of free government.... He would extinguish the fire of liberty, which warms and animates the hearts of happy millions and invites all the nations of the earth to imitate our example.

3. Woodrow Wilson, Second Inaugural Address, March 5, 1917:

We are provincials no longer.... And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be the more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we have been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the principles of a liberated mankind.

4. Calvin Coolidge, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1925:

We stand at the opening of the one hundred and fiftieth year since our national consciousness first asserted itself by unmistakable action with an array of force. The old sentiment of detached and dependent colonies disappeared in the new sentiment of a united and independent Nation. Men began to discard the narrow confines of a local charter for the broader opportunities of a national constitution. Under the eternal urge of freedom we became an independent Nation. A little less than 50 years later that freedom and independence were reasserted in the face of all the world, and guarded, supported, and secured by the Monroe doctrine. The narrow fringe of States along the Atlantic seaboard advanced its frontiers across the hills and plains of an intervening continent until it passed down the golden slope to the Pacific. We made freedom a birthright. We extended our domain over distant islands in order to safeguard our own interests and accepted the consequent obligation to bestow justice and liberty upon less favored peoples.... Throughout all these experiences we have enlarged our freedom, we have strengthened our independence. We have been, and propose to be, more and more American.

And, to make it clear that this sentiment continues in our own times, consider the following:

5. George Bush, State of the Union Message, January 31, 1990:

America—not just the nation, but an idea, alive in the minds of people everywhere. As this new world takes shape, America stands at the center of a widening circle of freedom—today, tomorrow and into the next century.

Now what do these statements have in common? They are characterized by several leading ideas.

First, that America is something essentially new in human history, not simply another nation, or a rearrangement of previous systems, but something new introduced for the first time into mankind’s annals.

Second, that America is important because she is the bearer of liberty, and this liberty is actually meant for all, for America “invites all the nations of the earth to imitate our example.”

Third, that since America fundamentally is an incarnation of freedom, the principles of America are not peculiar or narrow or somehow have to do with only one particular people or nation. No, they are “the principles of a liberated mankind.” Americanism is thus universal, or should be, for “America stands at the center of a widening circle of freedom,” though some “less favored peoples” have perhaps not yet realized their birthright. In other words, to be fully a human being is to be an American!

Yet, paradoxically (so our ideology says), in carrying out our “obligation to bestow justice and liberty upon less favored peoples” we are not imposing something alien on them, as if (say) one attempted to impose German culture on the Poles or English on the Irish. For our principles and way of life are those of all “liberated mankind.” We hold in trust, as it were, values and ideas which it was our good fortune to be the first to exemplify, but which it is also our good fortune to be able to extend around the earth.

Now, according to this doctrine of America, we hold in trust ideas and a way of life which are meant for all. The chief idea, as I have said, is that of freedom, freedom to have abortions and engage in homosexual conduct, to be sure, but also freedom to destroy culture and disrupt communities for the sake of profit.

I think it is extremely interesting that Michael Novak’s foray against Liberation Theology was based on the thesis that in fact democratic capitalism is the true liberation theology. Indeed, he is right. Democratic capitalism destroys traditional cultures and communities and liberates man from the customs of his ancestors much more readily than does the Marxist state. In one sense, then, the U.S. is the New Order of the Ages, as the Great Seal of the United States says. It is in revolt against the entire fabric of our civilization and its customs and traditions. Perhaps, then, one translates Novus Ordo Seclorum better as the “New Order of Secularism”“!

If this is so, however, it also has a curious result for those of us already enjoying or suffering the American way of life. It is this: Since our nation stands for something universal, to be patriotic is basically to adhere to certain universal principles, primarily that of freedom. It is not loyalty to a nation or a people, but to certain universal ideas. These ideas are embodied in a regime, it is true, but that regime is important because with it the “new era” of freedom for mankind has begun. In other words, to love America is necessarily to love what it is presumed to stand for. It is thus impossible to be a patriotic American and to reject or question the regime of 1776 and 1787, or to fail to revere the sacred set of historical events that led to the founding of that regime, together with its savior, George Washington.

Now I regard this notion of America, namely that America is the embodiment of an idea, the idea of freedom, a kind of freedom and a way of life essentially new in human history, meant as a model for all men; I regard this, I say, as a kind of blasphemy.

It is the political and social expression of the Americanist heresy. It affirms that mere political arrangements can essentially alter the human condition. It rejects the need for grace. It subordinates Christ’s Church to the regime of 1776 and 1787, making Washington and the other Founding Fathers the saviors, not Jesus Christ. And although the Great Seal of the United States proclaims officially, Novus Ordo Seclorum, the New Order of the Ages, only the one Church of God can claim that title, for only the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and the introduction of saving grace into human history have essentially changed anything. It is not America that produces the new man or the new way of life but Jesus Christ and his Church.

Our way of looking at the United States Constitution is another facet of this kind of patriotic loyalty to an ideology. Americans practically worship the Constitution. Yet the document itself is a workable but hardly sacred arrangement for governing, embodying few if any statements of ultimate value and not mentioning Almighty God at all. At one time it was perfectly compatible with human slavery and was, for decades, judged to allow the unborn to be freely slaughtered. Though this last aberration was undoubtedly not a correct extrapolation, as Dodds demonstrated, nevertheless the Constitution is largely a procedural document, and cannot be depended upon for upholding the fundamental moral principles that ought to characterize a political community.

In addition to appropriating for America honor that rightly belongs only to the Church, this reigning notion of patriotism in America is not the traditional Catholic conception of patriotism. Patriotism is loyalty to a nation, not to an idea, especially an erroneous and blasphemous one.

True patriotism, which is largely lacking in the United States, is love of one’s country, the people, and the land, based on affection.

Now affection is a kind of love among those who happen to be together. It is the kind of love we have for children, parents and other relatives, one’s neighbors, fellow townsmen, etc. The love of charity should extend to everyone. In friendship and romantic love we obviously choose based on our likings and tastes, but affection is the love we bear simply because someone is near to us and we have grown accustomed to him. With affection we love people because they are ours and we are comfortable with them. We do not necessarily claim anything special about them, simply that they are ours and their ways are familiar to us.

But this love of one’s own extends beyond family and neighborhood to one’s region and nation, to the people and the entire way of life of the nation, and especially the land, the very soil. Not because it is beautiful or fertile, but because it is this land, this mountain. As Leo XIII wrote, “the natural law enjoins us to love devotedly and to defend the country in which we had birth, and in which we were brought up.” This is patriotism in the Catholic sense, the patriotism Chesterton speaks so much of—something that is a duty and, for most of us, a natural pleasure as well.

But note that it has nothing to do with any political philosophy or type of government. It is directed to what is permanent in the nation, not to the ideology of any particular regime. Does a Frenchman have to accept their Revolution to love France? Or must a Russian cheer on his regime, whether Soviet or post-Soviet, to love Russia?

Yet here in America, enthusiasm for the regime and what it stands for is equated with love of country. Patriotic oratory in America typically includes a recital of our sacred history of the establishment of freedom incarnate in the events of the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, usually ending with a peroration lauding us as the greatest nation on the earth precisely because of this freedom and the prosperity allegedly resulting from it, and as a model for other nations. The uncritical acceptance of the patriotism that regards us as bearers of freedom for the whole world has, I think, actually tended to diminish the other kind of patriotism, the traditional and healthy sort. There is no contradiction between the traditional kind of patriotism and the Faith, and America could well use much more of it.

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett in an article “Horatius at the Bridge” in Journal of Family and Culture exemplified the fallacy rampant in America from the confusion of these two types of patriotism. Bennett introduced the Roman hero Horatius, who held an army at bay on a narrow bridge to give his fellow Romans time to cut the bridge behind him. He thus faced nearly certain death to save Rome. Bennett quoted from Macaulay’s poem:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The captain of the gate:

“To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can a man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his gods?”

This is the quintessence of the correct sort of patriotism. Not allegiance to a political ideology or regime, but simply affection and reverence toward the things that are one’s own.

But interestingly, Bennett continued by censuring some American high school students who “saw no moral difference between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Bennett went on to say:

I have to wonder what Horatius would say about such moral confusion. I wonder what he would say to the greatest nation on earth; a democracy that has attained gifts of political and individual freedom equaled for centuries only in dreams; a country that raises some of its brightest children to regard the values of a totalitarian police state as morally commensurate with it own.

Now which is it to be? Are we to love the U.S. because she is alleged to be “the greatest nation on earth” or because her soil contains the graves of our ancestors and the shrines of our faith? Macaulay’s Horatius did not say he was glad to die for Rome because Rome was the greatest nation on earth. No, he said he would die for her simply because she was his own. Moreover, if the reason we are to be patriotic Americans is because America is said to be “the greatest nation on earth,” then obviously no other peoples in the world can be patriotic because their poor countries are less than the greatest. They have nothing to be patriotic about!

I anticipate two objections.

First, I recognize that perhaps many peoples consider that their countries have special missions in the world, perhaps even universal missions. But this is different from considering the nation only as the incarnation of an idea. To love Spain or France or Russia as one’s own, andto believe that each is entrusted with a mission for the rest of the world is one thing; to regard love for America as simply love for the ideology of freedom is surely another and very different thing.

The second has to do with the traditional conception of patriotism as affection for one’s own, just because it is one’s own. Some, perhaps, may fear this this could lead to a Nazi-like irrational exaltation of one’s own country at the expense of its own citizens and of neighboring countries. But this is not so. True patriotism is a reasonable affection for one’s own nation, and just as reasonable affection for family need not conflict with the demands of justice, so true love of country need not either. As a matter of fact, the patriotism of America as universal ideal is much more apt to lead to aggression and injustice, because we can interpret all our acts as being acts on behalf of mankind, bestowing “justice and liberty upon less favored peoples.”

Before ending, I must quote from what is perhaps the most unusual example that I know of the patriotism of the ideal, this political expression of the Americanist heresy. This is from a text called “I Am an American,” written by a law professor at a midwestern Catholic university in 1938 and inserted in the “Congressional Record” in 1984 (page E2210). The document consists of ten assertions and, appropriately enough, begins like the other ten commandments.

I AM AN AMERICAN

Thou shalt not put strange gods before me. I will not adore them nor serve them...

1. I am an American. I hold that Americanism is more than a creed; that Americanism is a pattern of life, designed upon these principles: Honor to God, love of neighbor, reliance upon self.

And the author concludes with assertion number 10:

I hold it heaven upon earth to be an American. I pray to the great God in whom I trust to spare me the errors, the mists and the tempests that fill this vale below; in His mercy and goodness to grant to me, in adversity as in prosperity, to stay what I am, an American.

Can more be said? Pity Jesus Christ, who, when he preached honor to God and love of neighbor, did not realize that he was establishing two pillars of Americanism, or that every just man throughout history has, unwittingly, been an Americanist. Then in our trials and sorrows in this vale below, let us remember to invoke St. Joseph, now no longer called “just man” by the Holy Spirit, but simply The American.

The medieval scholastic definition of evil has never been refuted or surpassed: the absence of what should be present. It is the should that clinches it, for a mere absence of something is not evil. It is not evil that there is an absence of green in the red rose. Green should not be present. That there are real absences in the world, in human actions and lives, in being, goodness, truth, and beauty, absences that are not supposed to be there, is a great mystery. The greatest of beings, goods, truths, and beauties is defined as God, in whom there is and could not possibly be any absence. Everyone, believer or not, ineluctably holds something to be absolute, without absence, perfectly good, and he lives in orientation to it, whether he admits this to himself or not. For the Christian, the absolute and thus greatest of goods is that God became one of us: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The most incomprehensible thing about this event is that it wasn’t evil. How could the infinite God become a finite man without suffering an absence of what should be present, His divinity, that is, without evil? Only Faith can contemplate this mystery.

The greatest possible good for man, the Incarnation, was followed thirty-three years later by the greatest possible evil of man, an act with the greatest possible absence of what should have been most present. Even the non-believer cannot doubt the enormous evil of this act, for even a purely historical understanding of the event reveals Jesus to be the most innocent man to walk the face of the earth, and that he was killed precisely because of this. And yet, as He died freely and intentionally out of love for human beings, this event of absolute evil was also the greatest act of love possible by both God and man, as He was both. Finally, Christians claim to know—though, again, all the evidence indicates it—this greatest evil, this greatest absence of what should have been present, was followed by an even more and unimaginable perfect presence, the Resurrection, the Risen and Ascended Lord reigning over all for all eternity, yet in our midst even today through the Holy Spirit and the Church that is His Mystical Body on Earth.

The murder of God, Jesus crucified, is thus the defining event, epiphany, and icon of both perfect goodness and absolute evil, containing and determining once and for all the ultimate meaning of good and evil for all time and eternity. One can say that Plato’s Good, the cause and meaning of all existence, descended from the Sun into the Cave as a person, one who lived the perfect human life, and because he was both God and man, that life enabled every human being to escape the cave of sin through participation in that perfection. We, and not just Christians, now know what goodness truly is, a human life of sacrificial love of God and neighbor in imitation of and obedience to the God-man, and thus what evil is, a life of disobedience and hatred of God and neighbor. There can be no greater good for man than salvation, both our own and that of our neighbor, and no greater evil than damnation, both our own and that of our neighbor: “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and yet he hates his brother or sister, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother and sister whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

Due to the inestimable influence of the Christ event on human consciousness, culture, and history, there is no denying this new and definitive meaning and standard of good and evil, even by the unbeliever, as is made clear by Tom Holland, an agnostic, in his magnificent book Dominion. Non and even anti-Christians may try to create an alternative moral paradigm—and boy have they tried—but what is done is done. The Christ event is seared into the consciousness of man until the end of time. All their attempts throughout history have only foregrounded it all the more starkly. Even if we were to reduce the event to just a story or myth, it is the greatest of them all, one that men cannot forget, for it has permanently changed the moral and spiritual consciousness of humanity. The secular humanist cannot but propose love of neighbor as the highest moral imperative, though he knows not why. As René Girard has taught us, the concern for and defense of the victim is now, and has been since the Gospels triumphed over the Pharisees’ scapegoating lies, the ultimate moral and political priority of the “secular” societies and political orders of the West. Communism, liberalism, transhumanism, and “woke” are just secularized gospels, for they couldn’t exist without the Gospel.

In the plan of God, all human lives are meant to be participations in the life of the God-man, with all our actions incorporated and recapitulated into His one Action. If this is the case, then all imitations of human action, all stories, are just facets and episodes and versions of the story, compared to which the most tragic and comedic of tales are mere trifles. Since the greatest good and the greatest evil occurred simultaneously, we can infer that for humans, after the fall into sin, to learn about goodness, to do good actions, and to become good, we must also learn about and experience evil. Adam and Eve, before their fall, did not have to learn this way, but we cannot return to their unfallen pedagogical mode, though we aspire through grace to experience God intimately as they did by nature. The greatest of stories, then, are those that best imitate the Story, those that not only most powerfully and profoundly incorporate and present both evil and good as they really are, but also allow the reader intimately to experience these so as to love and hate what he ought, which, as Plato and Aristotle taught us, is the definition of the purpose of education.

The books we read this past year in “Evil 12” are some of these greatest of stories, for the evil portrayed in them so accurately, whether horrific and nightmarish or subtle and uncanny, leads the reader to recognize and love goodness all the more. I will say something about each of them, focusing on how they convey the depths of both evil and goodness in imitation of the Gospel. I am presuming the reader’s acquaintance with the basic plots, so I will not go into much detail, and I will be zeroing in on the cruciform teaching of evil in each of them.

What have you done—What have you done to yourself?

Our first book was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When we meet Raskalnikov, well before the murder that begins his journey into the depths of evil as well as goodness, he is already in a malaise of darkness, a living hell. If the book were written a hundred years later, his state would have been identified as clinical depression or mental illness, and accurately so, but such pharmacological categories provide a label more than an explanation, for the afflictions of the mind are as mysterious and unfathomable as those of the spirit, which often occur together and cannot be neatly separated. Dostoyevsky knew this, and instead of merely labeling or describing, or even trying to explain the cause of Raskolnikov’s condition, he invites us to share in his very consciousness through masterful narrative combining interior dialogue and description:

When he was in the street he cried out, ‘Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and can I, can I possibly…. No, it’s nonsense, it’s rubbish!’ he added resolutely. ‘And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head? What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all, disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!—and for a whole month I’ve been….’ But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness.

Dostoyevsky’s masterful depiction of Raskolnikov’s state invites a variety of “explanations”: mental illness, physical maladies, environmental ugliness, cultural degradation, economic destitution, familial dysfunction, ideological corruption, et. al. And all of these do play a role, as they always do in real life. But the brilliance of Dostoyevsky’s characterization is that any of them could account for Raskolnikov, yet none do. Why anyone could be in such a state that murdering someone in cold blood has become a live option, and why one would choose this option, cannot adequately be explained. Surely one could say accurate things about it, involving deep theological, metaphysical, and psychological truths and compelling arguments, but the mystery of evil is beyond academic speech. What Dostoyevsky, the novelist, is able to do in narrative form is convey evil’s ineffable mystery that shrouds the explicable, the spiritual residing in the material, the natural charged with the supernatural, the uncanny pervading the ordinary, and the diabolical working with the psychological.

At a certain point before the murder, Raskolnikov overhears a bar conversation about philosophy and becomes completely obsessed with the Nietzschean idea, first articulated by Plato in the Republic through the mouthpiece of Thrasymachus, that “morality” is nothing but a social construct, with right and wrong merely conventional, customary, and arbitrary constraints on human behavior surreptitiouly created by the weak to enslave the strong but feared and revered by all as a sacred and divine authority. Raskolnikov not only entertained the possible truth of this theory but also imagined himself as one of these strong men; he just lacked the courage to realize his true nature by committing an act of sacrilege against the moral law and thereby transcending it. By a sort of evil providence, all the circumstances and events of his life seem inexorably to lead him to the murder of his neighborhood pawn broker as the only way to test his new theory and perhaps escape the living hell of his present life.

The primary and most profound evil is not Raskolnikov’s murder of the miserable and vicious pawn broker, which cannot be excused but can at least be understood as the effect of a temporary ideologically insanity in which it seemed a rational, utilitarian calculus for the greater social good, if not merely to provide for his stuggling widowed mother, but his unplanned murder of her poor, innocent, mentally disabled sister, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This heinous act can neither be excused nor understood. It was an act of pure malice, and malice is incomprehensible. Raskolnikov did not want to go to jail and suffer for his crime, so he was in a position to do anything to prevent this—anything. At that moment, “I want” became god for Raskolnikov, the culmination and epiphany of the satanic theology on which he had been meditating for months.

Instead of becoming the Übermensch, Raskolnikov, whose name means “division,” descends into an even deeper hell of soul than the one from which this hellish act emerged. The rest of the book is his journey to redemption, on which the reader meets various “doubles” of Raskolnikov, characters who commit analogous evils and embark on parallel journeys and thus serve as literary mirrors in which both the reader and Raskolnikov can see more deeply into themselves and the intimate connectedness of the human psyche and spirit. These doubles provide the possibility of Raskolnikov’s redemption. Sonia is the most powerful of them all:

She jumped up, seeming not to know what she was doing, and, wringing her hands, walked into the middle of the room; but quickly went back and sat down again beside him, her shoulder almost touching his. All of a sudden she started as though she had been stabbed, uttered a cry and fell on her knees before him, she did not know why. ‘What have you done—what have you done to yourself?’ she said in despair, and, jumping up, she flung herself on his neck, threw her arms round him, and held him tightly. Raskolnikov drew back and looked at her with a mournful smile. ‘You are a strange girl, Sonia—you kiss me and hug me when I tell you about that…. You don’t think what you are doing.’ ‘There is no one—no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!’ she cried in a frenzy, not hearing what he said, and she suddenly broke into violent hysterical weeping.

“What have you done to yourself?” Raskolnikov could have asked Sonia the same question, for she was a prostitute. Thus, the doubling. But as depicted in this dialogue, Sonia loves Raskolnikov more than herself, and much more than Raskolnikov does himself. It is her love—gratuitous, inexorable, supernatural, mysterious—that continually deflects Raskolnikov from the path of damnation, in contrast to Svidrigailov, another double and mirror, in whom we see a Raskolnikov without a Sonia. Only Sonia’s inexplicable and fathomless goodness can counter and transform Raskolnikov’s inexplicable and fathomless evil, and in the end, both are redeemed.

Ivan Illych: a most terrible life

The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

—C. S. Lewis

There is no murder in this story, and no satanic theology justifying it. Of course, there is a death in this story, but it is not depicted as evil. On the contrary, death was the best thing that ever happened to Ivan Illyich, for it was his life that was evil:

“Three days of frightful suffering and the death! Why, that might suddenly, at any time, happen to me,” he thought, and for a moment felt terrified. But — he did not himself know how — the customary reflection at once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan Ilych and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him, and that to think that it could would be yielding to depression which he ought not to do.

As we see here, it was not only his life that was evil. His “friends” and even his family members treated him with annoyance at best and contempt at worst during his illness. All his relations, except one:

“Well, friend Gerasim,” said Peter Ivanovich, so as to say something. “It’s a sad affair, isn’t it?”

“It’s God will. We shall all come to it some day,” said Gerasim, displaying his teeth — the even white teeth of a healthy peasant . . .

Ivan is an upper-middle-class city judge in Russia, and the first half of the novella depicts his climbing of various bureaucratic and social ladders, acquisition of a wife and family, and settling down into the daily tasks and pleasures of a comfortable and pleasant life:

The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych’s greatest pleasure was playing bridge. He acknowledged that whatever disagreeable incident happened in his life, the pleasure that beamed like a ray of light above everything else was to sit down to bridge with good players, not noisy partners, and of course to four-handed bridge (with five players it was annoying to have to stand out, though one pretended not to mind), to play a clever and serious game (when the cards allowed it) and then to have supper and drink a glass of wine. after a game of bridge, especially if he had won a little (to win a large sum was unpleasant), Ivan Ilych went to bed in a specially good humour.

But as Tolstoy describes it: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” At the pinnacle of his carefully choreographed life of propriety, amusement, and career-advancing sinecures, Ivan falls off a ladder and bumps his side during a bout of obsessive apartment decorating, after which he develops an illness of the kidney that leads to his death. In the months between the fall and his death, we accompany Ivan as he passes through the various psychological and spiritual stages—hope, denial, despair, rage, depression—until hours before his death, after three straight days of agonized screaming, he discovers the meaning of life and makes peace with his death. Only the reader is witness to the transformation.

The evil that Tolstoy portrays so masterfully in the story is the absence of love, a love that should have been present. Ivan and his work, social, and family relations appear to be good people living good lives: educated, prosperous, industrious, cultured, moderate, sensible, and law-abiding. But, as Ivan discovers in his great suffering, when only Gerasim shows him any love and compassion, his life was and had been, since his childhood, completely meaningless. And it was meaningless because it was loveless. His life had everything except that which makes life actually worth living—transcendent purpose, relationships of love, and most of all God. It was surely possible for Ivan to have lived a more meaningful life in his professional, bourgeois urban culture and lifestyle—doing his daily legal work, playing Bridge, going to fancy dinners, decorating his house, etc. Such mundane tasks, humdrum activities, and superficial concerns are the context in which most live out their spiritual lives, and Tolstoy doesn’t mean to imply that one cannot live in the world and not be of it. But Ivan chose to be of the world.

The pleasures, amusements, and goods of the world are not evil in themselves, but are only good as bodily accompaniments for, instruments of, and means to the higher goods of the soul, such as meaning, personal love, virtue, and religion, and even these are only good if they are sought and experienced as mediators and pathways to God. It would be better to have nothing, or even nothing but evils, than to have all goods but not the love of God and neighbor, especially when it is the possession of goods, even if not an excessive amount, that blinds one to the emptiness of them. This was the case with Ivan. It was only when Ivan had nothing but suffering and imminent death that he realized his “good” life was the very apotheosis of evil, for it was a life absent precisely that good which should have been most present. He had a sense of what this good was, something to do with the soul, meaning, love, and God, yet it was vague and abstract, not experimental and visceral. He still did not really know what this good was. He knew it had something to do with Gerasim, who had once allowed Ivan to rest his legs upon his back when the pain was unendurable. But what was it exactly? And why didn’t Ivan know? “In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.” The whole purpose of life is to prepare for death, as Plato and all traditional wisdom literature and religions teach. But Ivan had spent his entire life preparing merely for more life, and now that there was no more of it left, he was at a loss to know what to think or do.

Ivan’s final realization before his death, and what saved him from dying unrepentant in despair, is that love is all that matters in life, and it conquers death. This wisdom was his reward for making a last-minute, small but pure act of love, perhaps for the first time in his life, right before he died. Here in Ivan’s death scene we see the juxtaposition and coincidence of evil and good, suffering and love, that is the cruciform essence of both:

At that very moment Ivan Ilych fell through and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked himself, “What is the right thing?” and grew still, listening. Then he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at his son, and felt sorry for him. His wife came up to him and he glanced at her. She was gazing at him open-mouthed, with undried tears on her nose and cheek and a despairing look on her face. He felt sorry for her too.

“Yes, I am making them wretched,” he thought. “They are sorry, but it will be better for them when I die.” He wished to say this but had not the strength to utter it. “Besides, why speak? I must act,” he thought. with a look at his wife he indicated his son and said: “Take him away…sorry for him…sorry for you too….” He tried to add, “Forgive me,” but said “Forego” and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand.

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. “How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?”

He turned his attention to it.

“Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be.”

“And death…where is it?”

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.

“So that’s what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy!”

To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.

“It is finished!” said someone near him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

“Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!”

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

Bartleby: the monster of Wall Street

The Death of Ivan Illych is a parable of the spiritual danger of worldliness, but it can also be read as a sociological critique of the soulless bureaucracy of modernity, in which means become ends, power evacuates meaning, rules replace agency, and persons are sacrificed for profit. Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is also a parable and a critique. The object of Melville’s critique is clear, the dehumanizing culture of an incipient corporate capitalism, but the parable is harder to discern.

The plot is quite simple: An elderly business lawyer, the narrator, hires a man named Bartleby as a scrivener, a document copier or law clerk, and a few months into the job, Bartleby stops copying. He does not quit the job, but just copying, or anything else he is asked to do, responding to every task requested of him by his employer with “I would prefer not to.” The rest of the story consists of the narrator’s several failed attempts to remedy the situation, which include Bartleby literally sleeping in the office every evening, culminating in Bartleby being arrested, taken to prison, and dying.

About the recent development of the “white-collar worker” and the “office” in Melville’s time, a recent book notes:

In some heavily mercantile cities, such as New York, they had already become ubiquitous: the 1855 census recorded clerks as the city’s third largest occupational group, just behind servants and laborers. For many, this was a terrible development. Nothing about clerical labor was congenial to the way most Americans thought of work. Clerks didn’t work the land, lay railroad tracks, make ammunitions in factories, let alone hide away in a cabin by a small pond to raise beans and live deep. Unlike farming or factory work, office work didn’t produce anything. At best, it seemed to reproduce things.

Melville’s story certainly does not praise the work of the clerk, but neither does he demonize it. The lawyer and his clerks are depicted as ordinary working men, albeit neurotic ones, and the office is clean and orderly, though lacking a view of the sky and replete with walls, seemingly everywhere. It’s certainly not an exciting, meaningful, or fulfilling job, but it pays the bills better than manual labor and serves an important purpose in the new legal and financial culture of the mid-nineteenth century city. What Melville is trying to convey here is a much more subtle evil. And he does so by creating a monster.

Monsters exist, but only in the mind, for they are representations, symbols, metaphors, not actual persons. The word monster is derived from the Latin monstrare, meaning “to demonstrate,” and monere, “to warn.” Thus, monsters appear when something urgently needs to be shown, when there has been a failure to communicate and understand something of vital importance through ordinary, rational means, such as moral exhortation, custom, law, religion, or conscience. The monster is a warning, either of a past evil that has not been addressed or reckoned with, a present evil that lies hidden or is known but ignored, or a future evil that is bound to arrive if present actions, circumstances, and mindsets do not change for the better. Sometimes the monster embodies all three. The monster can not be reasoned with, ignored, pacified, or killed, and its message is infallibly delivered, because the message is the monster itself. Whether we learn what the monster has to teach us is another story.

Bartleby is a monster, though not a particularly scary or violent one. What is his message to the narrator, and to the reader? What past, present, or future evil does he embody?

The next day I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.

“Why, how now? what next?” exclaimed I, “do no more writing?”

“No more.”

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself,” he indifferently replied.

The lawyer never answers Bartleby’s question. It is the only question that Bartleby asks in the entire story, and just about the only exception to his repeated refrain of “I would prefer not to.” The reason is not, as the lawyer concludes, that Bartleby is going blind from innumerable hours of constant copying, although that is the case. The reason is that there was never a reason to do any copying in the first place, and thus no reason not to stop copying. Indeed, there was no reason to do anything at all.

And this was true. Bartleby is not only a monster but also a prophet. There is no reason to do anything. Of course, there are reasons why we do things, instrumental, utilitarian, calculative, logical reasons. One could say that our lives are nothing but a long, incessant series of particular acts of practical reasoning: for me to obtain, produce, or do that, I must obtain, produce, or do this. The daily life of a business law clerk is literally nothing but one practical calculation, logical inference, means-to-end-to-means-to-end reasoning after another regarding the legal minutiae of that which is, of all the occupations in the world, the most instrumental, utilitarian, and calculative—business.

So, there were certainly reasons, rational ones, for Bartleby both to begin his copy-work as a law clerk and to continue copying until the day he quit, was fired, or died. However, although the instrumental logic of the law office is clear and compelling—do the copying, and do it using such and such procedures, because it is your job to do the copying, and it is your job because you were hired to do it, and you were hired to do it because you proved you could do it, etc.—workplaces provide no clear and compelling reason to do anything outside the narrow scope of their utilitarian, productive, calculative, and instrumental logic. And this is true for all human occupations and activities. In other words, the reason for engaging in any activity of human life, including the activity of just continuing to live, cannot be provided by the inner logic of that activity, for that logic only applies within the activity itself. If it is a matter of why one should do this or that activity, or anything at all, it is a question not about means but meaning. Practical reasoning can only answer how and provide the means to an end that is always-already given, implicit in but not the product of its reasoning. Activities presuppose but cannot deliver on their own a compelling answer as to why an activity is worth doing. The question of why any activity is worth doing, indeed, why life itself is worth living, must be answered outside of and before practical reasoning, whether in the context of a work environment or personal decision. In the absence of answers as to the end and the why of an activity, there is literally no reason to do it, and in the absence of the answer to the end and the why of life, there is no reason to live.

What we are talking about is meaning. Humans cannot live without meaning, and if they have not discovered a meaning for life that is fulfilling, they resort to ones that are not, with all the dehumanizing and degrading consequences that must ensue. In Melville’s depiction of Wall Street, the work-a-day world of means-to-ends, utility, calculation, and profit has become the locus of meaning for its inhabitants, and though they “function” in that world and continue to do their work, and probably will until the day they die, they exhibit clear signs of bodily, psychological, and spiritual dysfunction. But because they still retain some meaning, however tenuous, ersatz, and unfulfilling, a meaning apart and not derived from the work-a-day world, they can manage to keep going. Bartleby, however, does not function at all, and that is because he has lost all meaning. He is the monster of Wall Street, embodying in his ghost-like indolence, mindless refusal, and indifferent hopelessness a warning to his fellow workers and to the reader. The goodness that accompanies the revelation of evil is precisely the goodness of meaning, which is revealed as such in the utter horror of its complete absence in the monster.

There is literally no reason to do anything, for human life is not reducible to the logic of transaction and exchange, efficiency and productivity, calculation and risk, that is, means-to-end instrumentality. For if there is no end for which all our activities are means, then there are no means either. If everything is just a means, then it is all meaningless. Neither is life merely a matter of getting what one wants, for why do we want anything at all, and what if there is nothing at the end of all our incessant wanting that is worth wanting? Existence is not reasonable, not because it is irrational, but because it is pure gift, which transcends practical reason. Copying documents is only good because something other than copying is good, until we reach the Good itself, which infinitely transcends the order of practical reason of means, activity, and work. Bartleby is the monster that every human being can become when means become ends, when purpose, meaning, and love are eclipsed and replaced by the “rationality” of the work-a-day world. He is not an intimidating, violent, or destructive monster, for he represents the fatal wound of the soul that can only be self-inflicted.

In Part Two, we will discuss Solzhenitsyn, O’Connor, and Frankl.

I had a dream once

I could fly away

I had a dream

The city voices fade

Flying higher everyday

Is all I wanna do

Flying to a lovely place

Where all they want is

You as you are, not in costume

The songbird only sings when’s he’s ready

When the sunrise brings a song on the shore

Where he stays where he plays forever

No one says do better, no one says be brighter

No one says there’s no time and the world and a dime

Is the matter of a child

No one says it

No one says it

I had a dream once

All we did was playNo one keeps rhythm

No one’s on parade

Flying higher everyday

Is all I wanna do

Flying to a better place

Where all they want is

You as you are….

Bridge:

How could you make him feel lonely?

While a million know his name and

How could you rob him of the joy

In the song he might have given up

He might have stayed away

But he heard a voice saying

I’ll turn the mourning into dancing

Heard himself say despite

All the ways I may grow strange

I know that I have a role to play

Final Chorus:

I can turn the stage from a prison to something of the stars

I’m not fleeing now that I can have a say

I say no to the way it’s been done beforeWho says I can’t do more for those who

Dream of islands far away

I can say don’t go so far away

The joy that you are longing for is here

If you look for it

If you want it

Catholicism teaches that one may attend any valid rite of liturgy and even prefer one over the others and hold the opinion that it is better for oneself to attend that rite. It is even permissible to attend a parish that only celebrates this rite, including the unrevised pre-Vatican II rite of liturgy. One is also in his rights to be suspicious and skeptical about any non-magisterial teaching or norm that appears to contradict prior teachings or norms. But this is not what Catholic traditionalism is.

Catholic traditionalism is an ideology that claims that the non-revised pre-Vatican II liturgy is not only aesthetically and theologically superior to the revised rite, but that the revised rite is defective, even to the point of being harmful to souls. Catholic traditionalism teaches that not only should I exclusively attend the unrevised pre-Vatican II liturgy, but that every Catholic should because it is most conducive to holiness and salvation, with the revised “Novus Ordo” rite being at best spiritually defective and at worst directly harmful to souls. Catholic traditionalism (not the insane 58 sede cult, which does not merit anything but dismissal and contempt) thus claims that a valid pope in 1969 universally promulgated a liturgy for the whole church that harms souls. It also claims that the magisterium of the Catholic Church taught doctrinal errors at Vatican II. These claims mean that Church has defected, which is impossible and thus evil to claim. They are also schismatic claims because they are based upon fear of contamination from fellow Catholics and from a valid rite of liturgy, and the traditionalist thinks he is superior to fellow Catholics because of the elite company he keeps. This is the pharisaical lack of charity that constitutes the mortal sin of schism. But there’s something even more evil about Catholic traditionalism.

If were the case, per impossibile, that a valid and promulgated catholic rite of liturgy were harmful to souls, the magisterium would get rid of it or at least teach this to be the case until it could be phased out as quickly as possible. And if one rite of mass were spiritually better than another rite, the magisterium would teach this clearly. And this is because anything essential to salvation is taught and commanded by the magisterium. But nothing in Catholic traditionalism is taught magisterially. And the traditionalist would have it no other way. He believes none of the main doctrines of his cult because the magisterium commands them. If he did obey authority, then he wouldn’t be able to feel he deserves to be in an inner circle of clever and superior Catholics. The Magisterium is not an authority for Catholic traditionalists. Rather, they consider private non-magisterial judgments to be authoritative over and in place of the magisterium. What the Catholic traditionalist thinks is most vital to his salvation, namely, which doctrines he must believe and what moral norms he must adhere to and which liturgies he must attend, is not something he believes just because the magisterium teaches it. He would never have that! He believes it because he himself has “figured it out,” or because he believes some lay person or priest or Bishop or otherwise non-magisterial Catholic leader has, or because his superior inner circle group claims it. In other words, Catholic traditionalism is the rejection of authority, the authority of God as spoken through the magisterium. It is thus satanic.

Of course it lies about this exact point, and the traditionalist lies to himself, lest its diabolical deception be exposed. But here it is exposed! I expose you, diabolical cultist! There is no such thing as Catholic traditionalism. There is simply Catholicism, and its progressivist and traditionalist counterfeits.

1958 sedevacantism also rejects the magisterium and replaces it with private judgment, except it doesn’t believe the magisterium has existed at all after 1958, which is as wicked as it is insane. 58 sedes just want to belong to an even smaller inner circle than the mainstream trad cultist. Well, they’ll finally get what they want in Hell.

@EricRSammons

@DrKwasniewski

@meaningofcath

@OnePeterFive

@MattGaspers

@EsquireCatholic

@StephenKokx

Our life remains
A process of guilt and obfuscation
And it stays the same
No closer to the deeper truths
And further from a divine light

We rode on wings, baring our souls / Into the night
Leaving scattered remnants of self / When the stars fall
We fell from the sky / The depths went black
And with a blink / The lesser wind
Stood and teetered on the chasm’s brink / Submitting to the darkness

And grey, and black and nothingness
We form a line, from there to here
Hoping to find our way back

—Minsk, “Within and Without”

“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”

“...it’s my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.”

—Michel Foucault

Michele Foucault was committed to the “truth” that discourse is nothing but the surreptitiously coercive use of power, and the more hidden the power, the more effective the coercion. The power hiding behind claims to truth is so all-pervasive and effective that the very person who speaks and listens to discourse is itself its product and mouthpiece. The conviction that I am an individual person with agency and freedom and knowledge before I am influenced by words and the power hiding behind them is itself a mask of power, as is the “individual” himself. Nevertheless, Foucault used his non-agency over several decades trying to expose the powers hiding behind discourse systems and working to fight them. What if he were to win? To replace them with what? The truth? But there is no such thing—-it’s only power.

Foucault was right, though, if we confine his claim to the kind of discourse, and the institutions, society, and culture in which it is exercised, that has been thoroughly corrupted. For, the pure purpose of words is to discover and communicate reality, whether in a declarative, optative, interrogative, or exclamatory mode, as an act of love of God and neighbor, with self-effacing worship being the highest form of speech. When words are used against their pure purpose, such as to communicate unreality to gain power over another, this is the corruption of words, and when it becomes habitual and institutionalized, it evinces precisely the characteristics Foucault describes. Josef Pieper:

“Whoever speaks to another person--not simply, we presume, in spontaneous conversation but using well-considered words, and whoever in so doing is explicitly not committed to the truth--whoever, in other words, is in this guided by something other than the truth--such a person, from that moment on, no longer considers the other as partner, as equal. In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person. From that moment on, to be precise, all conversation ceases; all dialogue and all communication come to an end.”

“Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralized with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes.”

2020 was the inauguration of the global institutionalization of the corruption of discourse, and the Plandemic was its inaugural event. Domestic terrorism by the government (shutting down businesses, imprisoning the healthy, imposing the wearing of oxygen-depleting masks, etc.) and the deliberate democide of the world’s population through a mandatory poison injection were successfully translated into the discourse of “public health.” And in case there were still some leftover non-corrupted elements of discourse lying around, as well as to reinforce the mass corruption to irreversible levels, in 2022 they held the second inauguration in Ukraine, wherein supporting a literal Nazi genocide of Russian-speaking Ukrainians was successfully translated into “fighting for freedom.” In the meantime, self-mutilation became gender-freedom, conditioning children to tolerate and even desire being molested, inclusive curriculum, and let’s not forget the less-recent transformation of child-murder into reproductive health and elderly-murder into death with dignity.

The global program of discourse corruption was a top-down agenda, orchestrated by the elites of technology, corporations, intelligence, media, finance, medicine, science, academia, as well as the various alphabet-soup agencies of global control (WEF, NIH, CIA, WHO, FDA, CDC, etc.), the multitude of satanic foundations and thinktanks (Rockefeller, Council on Foreign Relations), and let’s not leave out the City of London, the Zionists, and the Freemasons. But it couldn’t have been as successful as it was without the cooperation of first the lower-tier rulers of discourse in the professions, business, religion, the arts, entertainment, education, tech industry, media, government bureaucracy, and management, and then the rest of us ordinary people, who used to be called the unwashed masses, but should now be called the brainwashed masses.

I am not writing this for the psychopaths and those confirmed in wickedness at the source of this malevolent fountain of language corruption, the die-hard Foucaltians in both theory and practice. And I am not writing for their lower-tier cooperators, those whose talents and vocations have put them in positions of cultural influence, but whose cowardice, venality, vanity, spite, envy, sloth, hypocrisy, virtue-signaling, faux-compassion, ambition, and overall worldliness has lead them to complicity in deception and slander for what they can get personally and career-wise. In Catholic circles, these types are legion on both the “right,” neocons, and the “left,” “progressives”—what binds them together is their worship of state power. These are so immersed in the corrupt discourse and so good at making the best of it that they wouldn’t know how to live outside of it, and they don’t want to.

Rather, I am writing to and for those of you aware of this corruption, for the most part at least, and are more victims than agents of this corruption, but who, due to the power and subtleness of this corruption, could too easily become agents—it is to help us avoid both victimage and complicity, and to empower us to unmask and destroy the corruption, that I write.

If you are still reading this, then it means that you hate the supreme evil of using language to manipulate and gain power, and would rather die than committ it. The first thing I want to say is that if you are indeed committed to using language as God intended it to be used, as an instrument of love, in the present climate, and it’s only getting worse, you are going to be hated, persecuted, gaslighted, mocked, canceled, scapegoated, driven to insanity (if you let them), and, in the not too distant future, murdered—many of those most dangerous to the lie-regime have indeed been murdered since the Plandemic began, and it has been happening at an exponential rate since Plandemic II, the Ukrainsane. But it seems to me that the violence will eventually spread to anyone committed to the truth and unwilling to hide this commitment.

The second important thing is that though we have this commitment to truth above power, the corruption is so pervasive and insidious that we are inevitably tainted with it, meaning that there are beliefs and judgments we are used to holding and asserting as true that are actually just vectors of power relations put into our minds by hidden manipulation and brainwashing. What those are in particular are for you to discover, but they are there. Pray and be quiet, watch and observe, inquire and doubt, read outside your comfort zone, accept the suffering of cognitive dissonance and the loss of some social relations and worldly securities that will come when you recognize and renounce what Pierre Grimes has called the pathologoi in your soul.

Thirdly, it is imperative to find others to talk to and be with that are committed to truth over power, and I mean actually committed, not just claiming to be or having the standard beliefs of someone who is committed. I can’t tell you how many Catholic, conservative, anti-postmodern, truth-believers I have met that are Foucaultian to the core in practice. And don’t get me started about “orthodox Catholic colleges” and certain kinds of homeschooling families with, say, more than four children and who decry what they call “rock music” (post-rock too?) and wives having their own wills. It’s as if they think their attendance at an ancient liturgy and the number of children they have will hide or justify their pathetic power-worship and love of manipulation and image over love and reality. It’s hard to find the good souls, but if they are present to you when you talk to them, and you really feel their presence, and if they are willing to suffer for you, when no one is looking, that’s some sure signs of their commitment.

Finally, take heart in the fact that God loves and protects those who refuse to put power over truth, because this means you desire Heaven, and His will, approval, and presence, more than anything else, and this makes Him happy.

Seeing God everywhere and all things upheld by Him is not a matter of sanctity,
but of plain sanity, because God IS everywhere and all things are upheld by Him.
What we do about it may be sanctity; but merely seeing it is sanity. To overlook God’s presence is not simply to be irreligious; it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there.

—Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this “Will to Truth” in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

—Frederick Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Why not untruth? I mean, it is a live option. We can know something to be true, and at the same time act like it isn’t, can we not? We can accept two opposing claims to be true, if we just want to. Nobody is stopping anyone. We can believe something knowing it’s not true, sort of, or disbelieve something knowing it to be true, to some extent. In short, we can disobey truth and we can obey untruth. We can do it. So, why not do it? Nietzsche wondered about this, specifically, why truth was privileged and deemed a non-negotiable and exclusive starting point in thinking and discourse. This was the case for his late-nineteenth-century Germans, and further back, since the time of Plato, when the latter invented the fateful and, for Nietzsche, foolish and servile and emasculating and dishonest distinction between appearance and reality, between the shadows of untruth and the Sun of truth, between the Good and what only appears to us as such.

The obvious one-word answer to Nietzsche’s question is insanity. Lying is knowing the truth about something but saying otherwise. The liar cares about the truth, but only for himself. But insanity is not caring about the truth at all, even for oneself. It is a sort of dedication, willing or otherwise, to untruth. To even pose the question, “Why not untruth,” is to flirt with insanity, to begin walking down the path that leads to it. It is tantamount to saying, “Why not insanity,” because sanity or mental health is secured and sustained through one’s dedication to reality, and truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. Being dedicated to something other and more than truth, then, is both an indication and cause of mental illness. M. Scott Peck:

Mental health is a dedication to reality at all costs; and mental illness occurs when the conscious will of the individual substantially deviates from the will of God, which is his or her own unconscious will. We attempt to defend our consciousness, our awareness, against reality. We do this by a variety of means which psychiatrists call defense mechanisms. All of us employ such defenses, thereby limiting our awareness. If in our laziness and fear of suffering we massively defend our awareness, then it will come to pass that our understanding of the world will bear little or no relation to reality. Although our conscious mind has denied reality, our unconscious which is omniscient, knows the true score and attempts to help us out by stimulating, through symptom formation, our conscious mind to the awareness that something is wrong. In other words, the painful and unwanted symptoms of mental illness are manifestations of grace. They are products of a powerful force, originating outside the consciousness which nurtures our spiritual growth.

Nietzsche was the first philosopher to pose seriously the question, “Why not untruth,” and to be taken seriously as a philosopher for doing so. The fact that he eventually went insane and never recovered is suggestive. Hamlet’s question, “To be or not to be?” is an equivalent interrogative sign of imminent insanity. Your and my existence is a gift we did not give ourselves, and it is one that we can’t unreceive. It simply is. There was once a “not to be” for us before we existed, but not after. To pose the possibility of “not being” as if we could make this possibility a reality is to move into unrealty, mental illness, insanity.

What prevents the vast majority of people from seriously entertaining this question, and living it out is the loving grace of God, keeping us in reality by making us suffer pain when we depart from it, like the pain we receive from touching a hot stove from which our mother may choose one time not to protect us so the lesson is firmly learned, never to be forgotten. We all depart from reality, particularly moral reality, from time to time and to some extent whenever we choose a lesser good over a higher good, when we lie or believe a lie knowing it’s a lie, when we seek to gain unjustly, when we act self-interestedly when duty-bound to care for another, etc. Internally, we suffer interior guilt for such actions, and if we repeatedly ignore or repress or rationalize the guilt, we suffer some level of mental illness. Externally, we suffer the moral opprobrium of friends and society when we trespass against the law and moral norms and customs. If we rebel against and resent this external pressure and punishment, we may be put in jail or otherwise ostracized by family, friends, and society at large. All this pain and suffering is, as Peck says, for our spiritual growth: “God chastises those He loves.”

Truth is the good of the intellect, and that’s why Dante tells us that all those in the Inferno have lost the good of the intellect. To ask, “why not untruth” is thus to ask, “Why not evil,” since truth and goodness are equivalent, as are untruth and evil. In seeking an answer to this question, one is seeking the truth, the good of one’s intellect, so one cannot really ask this question honestly and earnestly. Is it akin for me to claim right now, “I am not writing,” as I write this sentence. “Why not untruth” is not a question posed to the intellect but an attack on the intellect, and so an attack on truth and reality. To even ask this question seriously and earnetly is to sin against the truth, against reality itself. It is thus to dedicate oneself to unreality, which is the definition of insanity, more specifically, moral and spiritual insanity. One would hope that, internally, God, working through what Peck calls the omniscient unconscious or what is more plainly called guilt, and, externally, society and culture through its laws, norms, customs, and other pressures and coercive punishments, will inflict enough merciful and just pain on those who are tempted to ask this question and thus dedicate themselves to unreality to prevent them from doing so, and on those who have already gone down this path, to wake them up to repentance and metanoia.

But what if not just a few insane weirdos but a whole population were to ask this anti-question, being seduced into doing so by a corrupt education and culture, and even brainwashed into doing so by trauma-based mind control, terror-ritual induced scapegoating, and mass formation? And what if the cultural elites and their toadies were relentlessly and ubiquitously to promote and endorse and celebrate such questioning, denigrating, punishing and marginalizing those who don’t or won’t ask it? This, of course, is not hypothetical. The internal defense mechanisms that usually protect the soul against consistently acting against reality are completely corrupted now, as the psychopaths who have no such internal guides have created a global pathocracy in their own image. Every institution from medicine to academia to journalism to politics is now fully predatorial and tyrannical, serving only itself and the elites at the expense of the good of those it is supposed to serve. It’s worse than this. These institutions are now systematically intended to maim and paralyze and kill, physically and spiritually, and feed off those who remain, keeping them barely alive. Everything is vampiric and parasitic now. Add to this the psychological damage of incessant propaganda rendering unreality reality to perception and imagination, the intellectual damage of ideological indoctrination replacing liberal education and common sense and tradition, the moral damage of immersion in a culture in rebellion against the Tao, particularly in sexual matters, and the spiritual damage of a Church in full apostasy, with its leader baptizing deadly injections as sacraments of the love of neighbor, destroying by deliberate confusion the salvific doctrines and sacraments of the Faith, and offering up the Mystical Body of Christ to the globalist Luciferians, such as Schwab and Gates, to use as they see fit. Not to mention the hordes of treasonous leftist Marxist intellectuals, who identify as Catholic but are nothing but white-washed tombs of hypocrisy and filth, serving as willing mouthpieces and maskers of the Luciferian Great Reset propaganda, from the LGBTQ agenda of normalizing pedophilia, to the plandemic agenda of mass brainwashing and medical and financial enslavement, to the “sustainable development” agenda of .00001 propertied and 99.9999 (of whomever is left after they attempt to redue the world population to 500 million) propertyless.

How is the ordinary twenty-first-century secular person, not God-fearing, well-catechized, liberally educated, virtuous, etc., so say the least, supposed to save his soul, let alone remain immune from these evils and thus avoid the temptation to commit his life to untruth? All the rewards and blandishments are there for the taking if you do, and hell is unleashed upon you if you don’t. Insane people have always considered themselves the sane ones, and psychopaths see their elite club as the superior breed, but they didn’t get to impose their judgments on the sane and the moral. Now they do, and they have. The insane question in Nietzsche’s day was “why not untruth” because truth was the default existential position. The fact that Nietzsche even received a public hearing for his question indicates that things then were not good. And soon after that, the question would lose all its shock value. But it took a century and a half for untruth to become the default and only position, with even the spark of consciousness of any alternative extinguished in the collective consciousness. The result of Nietzsche’s question eventually infecting the consciousness of mankind, plus a global propaganda campaign made possible by a level of technology and malice never before seen in human history, has not only been the global reign of untruth, but the spiritual lobotomization of the masses such that the question of truth, let alone it’s unimpeachable and nonnegotiable authority, is no longer posed. We all seem to be in Plato’s Cave now, but without anyone to break our chains.

But God is here, and He knows what’s happening, and He is allowing it. He can stop it in a nano-second. But He needs to test us, and this is the final exam. He is asking, “Do you love me” every time we are confronted with propaganda, every time we are pressured to act against truth, every time we have a choice to act to gain the praise of others at the expense of our integrity and what we know to be true, every time we are tempted to ignore the warnings of others, to accept a narrative before assessing it because it makes our lives more comfortable to believe and promote it, to indulge in the self-righteousness of scapegoating. For, to put anything, however much it seems “necessary” or “prudent” or “caring,” or “progressive,” above the truth in our thought and speech, and above the spiritual good of others and ourselves in our action, is to tell Jesus that you do not love Him, and he takes our answer quite seriously.

We can tell Jesus we love him, and perhaps that’s all we can do at this time. I think it’s good enough.

In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it [by technology] and rebels against tradition [especially by moral Subjectivism], resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age [ours? the twenty-first century?] really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger; for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. . . . The real picture is that of one dominant age . . . which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But even within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. . . .

The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. . . .

But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. . . . The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received; they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which overarched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education.

. . . Simple-minded critics may ask Why should you suppose they [the Conditioners] will be such bad men?’ But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. . . . Stepping outside the they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. [Remember Brave New They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Blinded, gagged and bound by confirmation
On this premise we iterate a lie
Why will stay unasked
They know, we know, it doesn’t matter

Barren hollow words, no information
We’re led to believe in self-applied deceit
This trope of ignorance, disinformation
Made to confuse, to light the shortened fuse

Wading through the rubble of ideologies
Cherrypicking madness to the gospel of suckers
Sustenancе for the greatest of idеas
Life is a machine, it will cater to me
Bow, serve, comply

Bared teeth, the lesson is complete
The stench of strange raw meat
Draw acolytes to feast
Rotting thoughts the treat

So who came up with your ideas
Before you spat them out like they were yours
Play the pawn, knowing where hope lies
Where it goes to die

—Meshuggah, “Light the Shortening Fuse”

“Why Truth? Why not rather untruth?”

—Frederick Nietzsche

You may want to read this essay before or after mine. It’s a great companion piece:

Every second brings us closer to death, and thus eternity. Stop reading and say that word. Say it again. Consider its meaning. Consider a never-ending state of being, either never-ending bliss, peace, and joy, or never-ending misery, frustration, and torture. Eternity begins right now, in this and every moment, and we are here undergoing this and all the moments allotted to us to decide, now and especially in our very last moment on earth, what our eternity will be like. God created us to live with Him, one with Him in an unimaginable intimacy, forever, and that forever-intimacy begins now, at this moment, if we want it to. Otherwise, we begin to live in hell, right now, at this moment, by separating ourselves from God through sin, and getting ourselves used to such separation so that when we end up in Hell, it will be no surprise, though we will be drowned in futile regret, relentless sorrow, and impotent rage for all eternity; indeed, we will become nothing but this.

I preface my essay with this because I want to put into perspective the evil we are facing and fighting. IXXI, the plandemic, and the Ukraininsane were and are mass-psychological, mass-terror operations created and orchestrated by a very small group of very evil and/or totally psychopathic people, enabled by another slightly larger group of somewhat evil and/or psychopathically susceptible people, and given mass-energy by a large group of cowardly, physical and psychological comfort-idolatrous people. Mass death and destruction, and eventually, total enslavement, were and are the main goals of the planners, as well as the demons—I mean, literal demons—inciting and energizing and empowering them. They have been largely successful in inflicting unprecedented and unspeakable death and destruction, and the enslavement process is well underway. But as my words at the outset suggest, there is a worse evil than these: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Now, not even Klaus Schwab can do this, but only God, so we should fear only unrepentant disobedience to His will, which is the only action that can put us in hell. And this action is caused by knowing and willing consent to grave evil, to mortal sin.

Those who blew up the buildings on IXXI, created the Sars-Cov 2 virus and the graphene-oxide spikeshot, and who are now trying to destroy Russia, the world economy, and provoke a nuclear holocaust (not sure how many, if any, of these people can take credit for all three) are happy with all the death and destruction they have caused and will continue to cause—absent a global mass resistance and Divine Intervention. They are even happier, I suppose, and most definitely surprised with the level of totalitarian physical and mental control they have gained over the global populace through their monstrous lies. But what Mr. Global or GlobalCap or the Pathocrats (to use the terms of Catherine Fitts, C.J. Hopkins, and Andrzej Łobaczewski respectively) truly want, and this desire of theirs comes directly from the demons they worship, is for us to become like them, to become evil, and for this, they need to do more than merely kill and enslave us. They need to get us to sin, and their chief strategy for this, which they also learned from Satan, is to get us to consent to the evil they are doing to us, that is, to make us, in effect, inflict the evil on ourselves. They want us above all to do this knowing it is evil, knowing that it is evil being done to us, evil that we are, in turn, doing to others, and evil we are doing to ourselves.

Now, how can they do this? Well, obviously they lie—and they lie constantly and always—and their lies need to be believed by the vast majority in order to have the power to murder, destroy, and enslave. They also need us to internalize the lies and construe them as the truth, to accept and live in their constructed reality, the new normal. This is, of course, the result of brainwashing, and they do this through relentless, ubiquitous, and sophisticated propaganda and trauma-based mind control. But when a person has internalized the commands of his oppressors and, say, voluntarily wears a medically useless mask and takes a poisonous injection after being put into a state of psychosis through mass-formation, the evil he inflicts upon himself is not voluntary. He is literally out of his mind and does not know what he is doing. Similarly with the evil that infected people through IXXI (the evils of scapegoating, wars of aggression, and idolatry), and is infecting people through the Ukraininsane. Add to IXXI’s evils the unhinged hatred of Putin—and I’m not saying he’s a good guy—and all things Russian, the siding with actual Nazis which, as several credible news reports have shown, are using Russian-speaking Ukrainians as human shields and blaming Russians for their atrocities (again, I’m not saying the Russian army isn’t also doing evil), and the enabling through this hatred and complicity the real possibility of a nuclear holocaust.

These are plainly the evil, self-and-other destructive actions of brainwashed people, unwitting dupes and useful idiots of the knowing wicked who are pulling their strings. Such evils, directly or indirectly, kill, destroy, and enslave on a massive scale but they won’t land someone in hell unless consented to. And in order to consent to these evils, we must know that they are evil, and choose to believe and do them anyway. So, the only means by which they can get us to consent to these and all the evils they are planning is to bring us in on the lies, as it were. They must make the truth of the evil available to us, even broadcast it to us to some extent, but not so much as to reveal it plainly so that we reject it. And this is precisely what they have done and are doing now.

The absurdity of the official “eighteen hijackers” story of IXXI, the insanity of asymptomatic transmission of a virus and treating healthy people as sick and contagious, the obvious medical uselessness and harm of masks and lockdowns, the clear danger and irrationality of taking an untested experimental injection that doesn’t prevent infection or spread, the mass deaths that are now occurring because of the injections all over the globe, hidden in plain sight, and the fact that the US and NATO are supporting actual nazis, along with a Jewish president who also supports them, engaging in war crimes against Ukrainian civilians (with Facebook now “approving” of posts that support these nazis)—these are all examples of the “truth-giving” propaganda I am talking about. And I don’t think all this is just an unintentional mishap by incompetent propagandists. When someone is confronted with these truths, and he still “believes” the propaganda and does the grave evils to himself and others that it instructs him to do, it may be that he is too far gone to see the truth, a complete victim of brainwashing and so no longer culpable for believing the lies and doing the evil directed by him because he actually believes them to be true and the actions good, and his ignorance is not entirely or seriously culpable.

But it might very well be that he both believes and doesn’t believe the propaganda, both knows and doesn’t know that they are lies, both judges and doesn’t judge that the actions he is doing and plans to do are good. In other words, could it be that this person has consented to the evil, and is simply lying to himself and others? Could it be his “ignorance” is more feigned than real, the result of culpable ignorance? Are there people who have actually asked and answered Nietzsche’s question: “Why Truth? Why not rather untruth?” Are there people who actually don’t believe the IXXI, or Covid, or Ukrain propaganda to be true, since truth is no longer a category of their reality, but believe and obey it anyway?

I am thinking that there may be more of these people than we suspect, and if so, we are seeing the ultimate success of the Enemy. I am not sure how to help people like this, people who, at best, are so worn out and despairful from two years of hell that they are now knowingly and willingly consenting to evil out of sheer exhaustion and lack of courage and self-respect, and at worst, have decided for untruth, other than to keep telling the truth in love, to warn against the wages of sin and encourage them not to give up, and to invite them into a relationship with the God who is Truth and Love, and who loves them so much he was willing to be tortured and murdered for them. Let us consent to this Love by never consenting to any lie or evil, no matter what. Eternity is at stake.

Shutdown the Shutdown, Unmask the Masks, and Neutralize the New Normal

As we are forced to don masks of submission and humiliation, the enemies of freedom, human flourishing, and all that is true, good, and beautiful are unmasking themselves, as their diabolical beliefs and criminal intentions become increasingly explicit and obvious. We can now see that we are the victims of the greatest mass-causality/mass-trauma crime and hoax in all human history, and the crime is ongoing, with no end in sight—due to a virus with a 99.7% survival rate.

Though they are attacking our physical bodies, their ultimate target is our minds and souls, and their main weapon is trauma and fear-based mind control. And there is only one invincible shield against fear, and that is love, for, as St. John teaches us, “Perfect love casts out all fear.” But we cannot love what and whom we do not know, and that is why they want above all to deprive us of the Truth, the truth about who we are, why we are on this earth, and the reality of our loving Creator. They want us all to exist within a counterfeit kingdom of their technological construction, in which we are all their willing slaves and hosts, instead of the kingdom that God has made, in which we are all called to be His children and co-heirs. To help us withstand the onslaught of lies, and the fear that always accompanies and cloaks them, we need to be grounded in the Truth about reality and ourselves.

All the major wisdom and religious traditions of the world agree in and are grounded upon the following set of philosophical and theological truths, though they express them differently according to their historical, cultural, conceptual, imaginative, and linguistic particularities. These are the fundamental truths of logos, that is, the metaphysical, moral, and spiritual order of the universe, accessible to human reason and perfected in the Divine Revelation of Jesus Christ. They comprise an indispensable bulwark and shield against the enemies of logos that are now engaged in an all-scale attack on human life.

Spiritual/Theological Truths

• The universe did not make itself, as it is not a necessary being. Thus, it must have been the creation of an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal God. Indeed, reality itself is continually being created and sustained in existence, moment-by-moment, by this God, who, being perfect, is infinite love and perfect happiness. Every moment, event, and circumstance of our lives is an ongoing gift of this God to us out of his infinite gratuitousness.

• God created human beings in His divine image to know, love, and serve Him because in doing so we participate and share in His infinite divinity and perfect happiness, and His loving will for every human being He has created is to share in His Divinity. Since God is eternal, such participation for us means eternal life with and in Him, beginning now and continuing forever after we die.

• We cannot know, love, and serve Him without His assistance because we are born with an ineradicable tendency to selfishness, separateness, and disobedience, rooted in pride and ignorance. Thus, prayer in all its forms—vocal, mental, meditative, silent, communal, liturgical, through which we access this assistance, is the most important and essential human activity.

• Knowledge and love of God make us like Him, and since He is love itself, love of neighbor flows inevitably from our growing likeness to Him. If we do are not loving our neighbor to the best of our ability, it means we are rejecting our likeness to God and our creaturely obligation.

• Both human reason and Divine Faith allow every human being to recognize Jesus Christ as the only possible human incarnation of the God described above.

Metaphysical Truths

• All that exists is good because being itself is good, as well as true and beautiful.

• The universe as a whole, as well as every part of it, is purposeful and intelligent, being made by a purposeful and intelligent creator.

• Evil exists, but it is parasitical—it has no independent being. It is a real absence of a real good that should exist but doesn’t due to deliberately bad human choices.

• Human beings can become evil in their souls due to deliberate, knowing, choices against the Good and their morally informed consciences. If they persist in these choices and do not repent of them, they will be punished for them in both this and the next life.

• Reality is more than mere matter, for it includes immutable, immaterial substantial form and eternal spirit. Matter doesn’t exist without the unchanging form that gives it definite essence and existence. Form doesn’t exist without matter, or at least some level of potency, as in the angels.

• Human beings are comprised of matter, form, and spirit, or, using different terms, body and soul. We are neither souls nor bodies alone, but soul and body syntheses or composites.

• Death is the separation of our body and soul, but since the soul is one and indivisible, it is immortal.

• All men by nature desire to know, and for the sake of knowing, since it is in knowing, loving, and acting in accordance with the Truth that men find their perfection and happiness.

• The human intellect can distinguish between what appears, on the one hand, and what is, on the other, that is, between opinion and knowledge. Thus, Truth exists and can be known as such.

• Truth is the conformity of our minds to reality (through human reason), and our minds to the mind of God (through prayer and the gift of Faith).

• All human actions are determined by thought and will (practical reason), which is the conformity of the intellect to the truth about the Good, and conformity of rational desire (the will) to right Reason.

• We are obliged by natural law to love and do good and to hate and avoid evil, and therefore we must be able to know the difference between good and evil, objectively and absolutely.

• The human intellect can grasp universal truth, and it can know essences and the causes of things.

• The attainment of Wisdom, not power or pleasure, is the purpose of our knowing. Wisdom is the loving knowledge of the most important truths about God and the universe accompanied by an inclination of the will to live and act in accordance with them.

• Knowing and loving in the natural, created order should prepare and dispose the mind for supernatural, mystical knowing and loving in supernatural, divine order.

Moral and Political Truths

• The human person is inherently good; therefore, he must never be treated by other humans as a means but only as an end.

• Men are social and political animals; thus, they find their perfection and happiness and good with each other in political community.

• The purpose of political community is to secure the material, moral, and spiritual conditions in which human being can thrive and flourish, and humans thrive and flourish through virtuous activity and contemplation of God.

• The natural law, which is the set of moral laws that govern the universe ordered to human good, happiness and perfection, is a higher authority than the political law, and thus both leaders and citizens must act in accordance with it as its inexorable subjects.

• Since human laws must be ordered to the human good and be in accordance with the natural law, when they are not, citizens are under no obligation to obey them.

• Just as human persons owe in justice obedience to and worship of God, so too do human persons in community, including the political community; thus, a godless political community is unjust and evil.

• If the political community, with its laws, institutions, economic structures, and cultural norms, is not ordered to the natural law and to God, it will necessarily become tyrannical and totalitarian, for it will exalt man’s will over God’s will, human law over the natural law, and lies over truth. Both history and political ethics prove this.

• The moral obligation to worship and follow God according to our consciences, and thus the freedom to do so, is part of the natural and divine law; thus, the State must not only do anything to hinder the exercise of this freedom, but it should also assist citizens in fulfilling this obligation.

Allow me now to quote the great Vernon Coleman, the “old man in a chair,” to connect these truths to the current “pandemic”. This was written well over a year ago and still applies:

1. Many doctors, including Dr Fauci, the American coronavirus supremo, have admitted that the risk of dying of the coronavirus may be similar to the risk with the flu.
2. The flu can kill 650,000 people a year around the world. Even though governments everywhere have admitted fiddling their totals, the covid-19 death total is only now approaching the global flu total.
3. Here’s how they fiddled the figures. In the UK, for example, anyone who tested positive for the coronavirus and subsequently died, was officially a covid-19 death – whatever else they had wrong with them.
4. The vast majority of those dying of the coronavirus were over 80 and had many other health problems. The risk for fit, young individuals is very small. The risk for children is smaller than the risk of being hit by lightning.
5. Research has shown that masks are dangerous, don’t prevent the spread of infection and almost certainly do more harm than good. The virus can go straight through the material of a mask. And mask wearing affects blood oxygen levels. At least two people have died through wearing masks.
6. Many of those promoting the coronavirus horror story are linked in some way to the vaccine industry or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which itself has strong financial links to the vaccine industry. For example, the Chief Scientific Advisor in the UK was formerly a senior executive at GSK – one of the big vaccine makers.
7. The British Government has admitted that at least four times as many people have died as a result of the lockdowns and other control measures as will have died from the coronavirus. The remedy has been much deadlier than the disease. Millions are waiting for cancer tests and treatment because hospitals were closed. And some hospital departments in the UK are still closed.
8. Neil Ferguson, the man whose predictions led to the lockdowns had produced a number of inaccurate predictions before he made wildly pessimistic predictions about the coronavirus. His track record is appalling. The college where he works has financial links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and vaccines.
9. Exactly the same mistakes have been made in almost every country in the world. For example, sick old people were taken out of hospital and dumped in care homes – resulting in tens of thousands of deaths in each country. That couldn’t be a coincidence – so it had to be a plan. If you remove the care home deaths from the UK total you end up with a maximum of around 20,000 deaths (though that is a massive exaggeration because they included flu and anyone who tested positive) which is much smaller than the annual flu death total.
10. The number of people who have caught the coronavirus worldwide is now said to be around 10 million. But the flu can affect 1 billion in a single year.

And if these ten facts haven’t yet convinced you of the hoax, here’s a compelling dialogue I discovered in a comment on Facebook. Sometimes the best things are hidden in plain sight:

Covidialogue (written over a year ago, amazing foresight)

🐑 why aren’t you a wearing a mask ?
🙂 because nobody here is ill & besides they don’t work.
🐑 you’re joking, right ?
🙂 no, hundreds of studies say they are useless, like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence. Masks also provide a better breeding ground for any bug/virus, and they reduce your fresh oxygen supply, and you’re breathing in more carbon dioxide.
🐑 you’re mad this virus is very deadly !!
🙂 not really the infection to death rate is 0.004 % if you’re under 70, 0.026% if you add the over 70s.
🐑 it killed lots of people in Wuhan
🙂 Wuhan has an elderly population full of respiratory problems & terrible air pollution. Perfect place to declare a new pandemic, plenty of scope to re-designate cases & deaths.
🐑 but what about all the people we saw dead in the street on the news ?
🙂 hmm yes how many people have you seen dead in the street here ?
🐑 ok but what about Italy ?
🙂 once again Lombardy has terrible air quality & an elderly population full of respiratory problems perfect for re-designation.
🐑but i saw videos of people really ill in hospital.
🙂the footage was proven to be fake.
🐑 but after the lockdown cases in china plummeted.
🙂 very convenient that the first lockdown happened in a communist country, where people have no rights & could then be presented to us as a success.
🐑 but the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic.
🙂 the world heath organisation has massive financial ties to Bill Gates, China and Big Pharma. Bill Gates is currently their biggest funder.
🐑 but the computer models said we were all going to die.
🙂 the models were produced by colleges funded by Bill Gates … they have got it wrong every time.
🐑 yes but that’s because the lockdowns saved us all.
🙂 no they didn’t, Japan had no lockdown, they have double the population of the UK, 122 million living in densely packed cities, they have had just over 1000 deaths.
🐑 but the nhs was almost over run. We had to build field hospitals.
🙂 no it wasn’t, not even for a minute .. the field hospitals were virtually never used & are now closed .. normal hospitals are empty.
🐑 but the virus is very contagious.
🙂 really … who do you know that’s had it ?
🐑 Boris & Prince Charles both had it.
🙂 yes two of the most protected men in the country .. what are the chances ?
🐑 but what about all the hospital covid cases back in April?
🙂 most people were diagnosed on symptoms … flu like symptoms.
🐑 yes but they test more people now.
🙂 yes with an inaccurate test that does not directly test for the virus.
People who were never even tested have received calls saying they have tested positive !!
🐑 but what about the antibody tests ?
🙂 even worse … according to the CDC it has trouble distinguishing between covid 19 & other corona virus’s including the common cold.
🐑but what about the excess deaths ?
🙂 what did you think would happen if you shut down half of the nhs & delay treatment & diagnosis to seriously ill people ?
🐑 but they say the deaths are down to covid 19 ?
🙂 many people were never tested or given a post-mortem, thousands of relatives of the deceased are complaining about falsified death certificates. The UK government have admitted they have been recording as covid deaths anyone who tested positive, but died of ANY cause, including dying in a car accident
🐑 but what about all the deaths in care homes ?
🙂 that’s what happens when they send elderly people with flu symptoms back to care homes full of vulnerable people, & pressure as many as possible to sign ‘do not resuscitate’ forms ..
all to protect the nhs of course.
🐑 but the government wouldn’t lie.
🙂 really … politicians don’t lie ?
Remind me how many weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq?
🐑 hmm ok .. but why lie about this ?
🙂 many government advisory bodies such as GAVI have huge financial links to Bill Gates & big pharma ..
🐑 yes but why would the BBC lie ?
🙂 the BBC receive millions from Bill Gates, and they are not neutral as they have us believe.
🐑 and the rest of the media ?
🙂 mostly owned by the one percent who own big pharma. Plus bad news sells.
🐑 but what do the governments gain ?
🙂 massively increased state control & a chance to implement massive social changes we would never normally accept, as in operation ‘Lockstep’
🐑 what is operation lockstep ?
🙂 a scenario modelled in 2010 by the Rockerfellers, simulating how the state could gain increased powers and control following a global pandemic originating in China.
🐑 and what do pharma companies get from this ?
🙂 vast profits from largely untested vaccines … it’s the only medicine you can sell to the healthy after all.
🐑 but surely the vaccine will be safe ?
🙂 so why are all pharmaceutical companies insisting on complete indemnity from compensation claims ?
🐑 but Bill Gates wants to give us all a digital health record surely that’s a good thing ?
🙂 no it means your life style & travel will be restricted unless you have his vaccine.
🐑 but why would the government give us all this money ?
🙂 they haven’t given us anything, they have borrowed it from the banks and the taxpayer will pay back every penny with interest.
The banks owned by the one percent will clean up again .
🐑 so why aren’t doctors speaking out ?
🙂 many are but since ‘Event 201’ highlighted the need to control the media, social media, google & youTube, anything that contradicts the Gates’ owned WHO version of events, is deleted.
🐑 what was Event 201 ?
🙂 a Gates funded exercise in Oct 2019 which just happened to simulate a world wide corona virus pandemic.
🐑 but Gates is a good guy he set up a charitable foundation.
🙂 yeah he got that idea from John Rockefeller. Perfect way to repair a shit public image … like Al Capone’s soup kitchens for the poor. In fact his foundation is a way of *making more money* rather than giving it away.
🐑 no … he wants to help the world. He’s vaccinating the kids in Asia and Africa
🙂 yes he is, mostly innocent children that have been forced these vaccinations. Many of those children have been severely damaged and even died as a result. If he really wanted to help, why not use his money to build roads, hospitals, or provide safe drinking water facilities.
🐑 gggyji
🙂 sorry I didn’t catch that, must be your mask … why are you wearing that again ?
🐑 the government & my TV told me to, anyway I don’t want to infect you.
🙂 you won’t, you’re not ill, and I have an immune system which will protect me!
🐑 yes but I may be asymptomatic.
🙂 asymptomatic transmission is highly unlikely even according to the WHO.
🐑 well at least I’ll pay by card, cash is dangerous.
🙂 but plastic wrapped packages are fine ?
🐑 well I’d better keep socially distant.
🙂 there’s nothing social about distance.
🐑 but it’s safer to be 2 meters apart
🙂 really what scientific study was that based on ?
🐑 but we have to be careful, there has been a spike in cases.
🙂 yes but hardly anyone is actually ill… there’s just 1000 people in hospital out of 66 million.
🐑 so why the spike ?
🙂 because they are testing more and more people with inaccurate tests to boost the numbers any way they can. Double-counted cases have been admitted by the U.K. Government
🐑 why would they want to do that ?
🙂 to keep people afraid until the winter when the flu kicks in after everyone takes the flu jab, therefore giving more scope to re-designate deaths.
🐑 but why do they want us afraid ?
🙂 so you will have the vaccine and won’t ask questions. It’s easier to control people when they’re afraid.
🐑 well at least if we have the vaccine it will be over ?
🙂 no it won’t … they will tell you it has mutated so you keep needing vaccine after vaccine. And would you trust a vaccine that has been rushed out in a few months, considering it normally takes at least 5-8 years?
🐑 I have to go now, Love Island is on TV..

The New World Order that is emerging from and through the Covid-hoax, a Dis-Order of technocratic, totalitarian rule, a globalist hunger-games economy of hundreds of masters and billions of slaves, and incessant and endless trauma-based mind control, must be resisted at all costs, for it is the attempt to set up an anti-logos system based upon a rejection of reality. I have tried to articulate this reality in the above set of principles. With these truths as a guide, and with Jesus Christ as our invincible strength, let us shut down the shutdown, unmask the masks, and neutralize the new normal.

The Cause of the Evil

The sacred is that which ineluctably holds us in its grip, a reality it is forbidden to eschew or doubt. The sacred is ineluctable and inevitable, for it is the divine ground of reality, and to treat it as a mere option, as modernity teaches us to do, is deadly to both the soul and the community of souls. The contemporary worship of “options”—from what brand of high-fructose poison to consume to what gender to adopt—is nothing but defiance of the sacred order of logos antecedent to and authoritative over any of our subjective preferences: “Am I really a creature of this God standing before me, or is He perhaps a creature like me? After all, I did not witness my own creation!” And with that proto-modern gesture of defiance, the Miltonian Lucifer inaugurated his eternal rejection of Reality. But what is sometimes taken to be sacred, of course, might not actually be so, for counterfeits abound, and we must defy idols at all costs. Indeed, any sacred in opposition to the One, True, Sacred of Jesus Christ and His Church is a lying counterfeit deserving to be smashed to smithereens.

Contemporary society is replete with idols, for it is not in conformity with the Gospel. Indeed, its leaders and reigning ideologies celebrate the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance: over a billion legally authorized murdered babies since abortion was first legalized in Soviet Russia; the ubiquitous public endorsement of sterilized fornication and sodomy; oligarchic theft through usury, taxes and wage slavery; and the physical, psychological, and spiritual oppression of the poor though the same, along with mass-media propaganda, formalized and systematic de-education, and ritualistic, trauma-based, state-sponsored mind-control events. Thus, everyone, and especially Christians, have a moral obligation to doubt the counterfeit sacreds that are offered to us for acceptance and worship by the puppeteers. From 2001 until March of 2020, the regnant counterfeit was the false-flag attacks of IXXI (as S.K. Bain has shown, a satanic, human-sacrifice ritual), and the genocidal war of terror it unleashed, resulting in millions of murders, a traumatized, brainwashed, and anemic populous, and an incipient globalist totalitarianism. Now we have been given the “Covid-19 pandemic,” and in both the scope and depth of its horrors, IXXI now looks neither satanic nor sacred—it looks more like Disneyland.

Now, lest the reader misunderstand, by “the Covid-19 pandemic” I do not mean any disease by that name, nor any virus purportedly causing it. For, as every bit of common-sense and scientific evidence, as well as the in-between-the-lines admissions of today’s principalities and powers (WHO and CDC), make abundantly clear, there is and has been no “Covid-19 pandemic.” As just a little research will tell you, if you can still think the true and will the good in this milieu of incessant propaganda and psychological torture, the global death rates have not significantly increased for this year, and the fatality rate for what is called Covid-19 is much less than 1% of those showing symptoms. What I mean, then, by “the Covid-19 pandemic” is the installation, under the cloud of a hoax pandemic and engineered “virus” (in truth, as Dr. Judy Mikovitz has proven, a pandemic of retro-virus diseases caused by decades of poisonous, animal-DNA infected vaccinations, now being deliberately triggered through the unleashing of a bio-engineered pathogen under the name Sars 2-Covid) of a global religion of Satan-worship commanding our obedience to the Great Lie and the fear and hatred of all that is true, good, and beautiful, including psychotically fearful, masked zombies celebrating their forced isolation and torture (see Amazing Polly, who makes it clear that the Covid “regulations” fit perfectly the Amnesty International definition of torture and Biderman’s “Chart of Coercion”), the destruction of their livelihood, the shutdown of the food supply chain, and the New Normal of the Hunger Games.

But isn’t the sacred an extinct relic of our benighted, superstitious, medieval past? In truth, the hell-on-earth that is emerging—and we are descending to lower levels each day—is precisely what we must have when the true Sacred is replaced with a false one, under the cover of the godless and nihilistic denial of the objective existence of any sacred at all—other than “my choice.” Reality Himself, Whom we should fear with holy reverence, the omnipotent, omnipresent, and invisible True and Only Sacred, namely, The Eternal Father, His Son the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit who is their Eternal Love, has been rejected and replaced by Unreality, a fake omnipotent, omnipresent, and invisible “virus” (literally, an existing nothing with no substance of its own) that we are commanded to fear with unholy terror or suffer perpetual mockery, ostracization, and even death (for those who dare speak out against it). And now, we must all be anointed, else be cast into the outer darkness, with a sacramental “vaccine” that is nothing other than a disease-delivery system inserted right into our DNA.

How can we account for this emerging hell-on-earth, overseen by psychopathic technocrats and their willing slaves, and orchestrated by demons and their occultist worshipers on earth? This is something literally unimaginable only a few months ago. I have been racking my brain for months trying to answer this question, and this morning it dawned on me. God is mercifully revealing to the world the naked and brutal reality of our collective choice, both personally and corporately, to live in unreality. This unreality is now being administered to the world by globalist elites using the latest propaganda technology and a panopticon-like surveillance and censorship apparatus. The effectiveness of their creation of unreality can be gauged by the success of their two-fold Big Lie, namely, that there is a deadly pandemic, and that asymptomatic transmission is a thing, a lie that has given these psychopaths total control of the world economy as well as all the major institutions of governance and culture.

Due especially to those in positions of responsibility and leadership embracing this lie, or at least not opposing it, but also to the masses who have irresponsibly deferred to these, we find ourselves in a seemingly inescapable matrix of inverted reality, with meaninglessness masking itself as conviction, fear as love, isolation as solidarity, destitution as generosity, poison as medicine, ideology as science, propaganda as fact, abuse as justice. But why have so many accepted a lie over the truth? I don’t think the answer is just the ubiquity and sophistication of the propaganda. Common sense and personal experience make it patently obvious that there is no pandemic, not to mention that the Elites have admitted it quite plainly (you just have to listen to what they are saying in between the lies—they have admitted that the Covid-19 fatality rate, for example, is comparable to a bad seasonal flu, and this even with so many deaths from other causes attributed to Covid). There is a widespread and mysterious yearning for these self-destructive lies.

Insofar as the West embraced Liberalism, i.e., the privatization of Truth and Goodness—practical atheism—we have already been living in unreality for centuries. The hard physical and legal totalitarianism we are now experiencing is but the flip side of the soft psychological and spiritual totalitarianism that has made us ready and willing to accept and even embrace the former. The empty shrine of the American idol of “the freedom of religion” was never actually empty, though the diabolical entities inhabiting it and manipulating our souls were then well disguised. Now, not so much. The same siren voices of authority that pre-Covid were instructing the left-minded to “question authority” and “keep religion out of the bedroom,” and the right-souled to “kill the terrorists over there before they kill us over here,” and “support our troops” is now commanding us to slowly suffocate ourselves and allow our livelihoods, communities, and families to be destroyed—and we listen and obey like the good Americans we are. After all, we’re free! We don’t have an “established religion” like those ragheads over there and those papists way back when. We’re enlightened! And that’s why we are lining up to be injected with a poisonous and fatal DNA-changing technology at the behest of senile pedophiles like Joe Biden, frauds like Anthony Fauci, and genocidal maniacs like Bill Gates. Individual liberty, the rule of law, and the separation of Church and state have quickly become individual self-enslavement, the rule of psychopathic will, and Church-approved state apotheosis (the American Bishops as a whole seem almost gleeful to give over their shephard staffs to moronic and brutal bureaucrats—wear your mask!). It was never freedom and autonomy and self-government was it? It was always obedience to the Sacred State and the demonic voice speaking through it. When that voice was seductive and libertine and mammon-friendly, then it seemed like freedom and bliss to obey it, but now that it is showing its true face, the face of pure hatred, control, and murder, we must still obey, even though we know that it is leading us to hell.

As I say, I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how we can get out of this seemingly inexorable spiral to complete enslavement and unimaginable horror. My conclusion is that we cannot. We are in a collective state of perfect possession. There are saints among us, of course, who have remained immune to the leprous spiritual disease, and these are suffering tremendously and heroically for us as victim souls; and there are many who are doing their best to resist the evil and insanity, though I am afraid many are doing it in the name of the very demons they think to be fighting -“bodily autonomy,” “individual liberty,” “religious freedom,” etc. The only solution is for the whole world to be given a clear vision of reality, for satan to be blinded if only for a moment, for everyone everywhere to see themselves as God sees them. Such an event is coming, very soon if the consensus of Catholic mystics and visionaries are right, and it is called the Miracle of the Illumination of all Consciences, or The Warning. Perhaps the only thing we can do right now, along with burning our facemasks, giving the finger to every Covid Karen we meet, and trying to find some land to buy off the grid, is to prepare our souls for it.

Your Government Hates You, but God Doesn’t

On John Waters’ Recent Masterpiece

Dr. Thaddeus Kozinski

May 15

5

Once is enough, trial is alone
Grace fall into us
All through the night
Father, I crawled
Sun of my soul, be revealed
Walking amongst the stones from the sky
Feeling their rhythm wash over me
Rite of this waring god
Destructive, alive, frees you now
Rivers of fear, don’t you know?
Vigil of faith stills you now
You’ve been shown over and over, don’t you know?
You’ve been shown over and over, don’t you know?

—Neurosis, “Stones from the Sky”

Here is John Waters’ essay

John Waters Unchained

YOUR Government Hates YOU . . .

A crime is being committed on an ongoing basis, all across the world, free and unfree. It is a crime of commission and omission, and arguably the most serious in either category that has ever been perpetrated. We are facing multiple crises but our governments tell us only about crises that are not crises, or at least not crises that…

Read more

7 days ago · 37 likes · John Waters

It really is a masterpiece. Astounding it is how many diverse strands of analysis—geopolitical, economic, historical, cultural, sociological, psychological, philosophical, theological—Waters’ seamlessly weaves together, articulated with unmatched grace and eloquence. And above all, Waters is prophetic. His penetrating analysis of the present situation is all to the purpose of warning us of what most certainly is to come:

It is exceedingly likely that, in addition to the risks of hyperinflation, within a few months, the chief currencies of the free world will, without exception, become subject to outright collapse, which means that the savings of citizens will become worthless. This will affect virtually all existing currencies, including the dollar, the pound sterling and the euro. In the unlikely event that anything remains in the wake of this meltdown, this is likely to be subject to governmental ‘bail-ins,’ which is to say that any remaining financial assets will be liable to partial or total confiscation. A global digital currency is planned but, leaving aside the myriad other problems and dangers arising from this, the chances of any future compensation of citizens under such a system are unpromising.

Right now, it is as though nothing like this could possibly be imminent, since it is receiving either negligible or extremely opaque or misleading coverage in the legacy media. Throughout our lives, we have become accustomed to a more or less honest press, which we have felt able to rely upon to alert us in times of danger. This press was by no means perfect — it was afflicted by manifold financial compromises and ideological corruptions. But never in the history of Western civilisation have we before been threatened by anything remotely like what is coming without as much as a murmur from the Fourth Estates of our nations and societies, to prepare us to defend our own and our families’ lives.

The absence of a warning, as we must surely know by now, offers no reassurance whatsoever. The dog-not-barking has been sedated and muzzled. Though expected to continue paying for these corrupted platforms, we must look elsewhere to discover and confirm the truth. Moreover, we need to be watchful for the new role of the old ‘Fourth Estate,’ which resides in deflecting us from any kind of certainty or even awareness of what is really happening. We most certainly need to take notive of and override the insinuated scorn that is one of the modern media’s core products: the rejection as ‘conspiracy theory’ of everything and anything that does not fit the prescribed Narrative. For the past two years, these tendencies have destroyed innumerable businesses and cost millions of lives. To be waylaid by the same voices now will almost certainly prove fatal to the very civilisation we have hitherto felt able to take for granted.

The world, including the former ‘free world,’ faces a calamity of existential proportions, and it will accelerate rapidly from the very near future. To describe this in factual terms is to invite the incredulity of most of those who may hear or read it described. It does not seem possible that those upon whom we have depended to protect our societies, our economic welfare, our lives and our well-being, could possibly not be warning us in the event that some such catastrophe is now imminent. That, after all, is the very definition of their function, and arguably the whole of their necessary purpose. But that is precisely what is occurring.

Let us state things straightforwardly: The world, including the former ‘civilised’ world, now faces shortages of essential products that are likely to lead to widespread hunger, hardship, and very possibly starvation, and death. The flashpoints are the most critical conceivable: food and fuel. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that these shortages are being deliberately engineered to achieve something akin to that outcome.

The upshot is that the ongoing war of the Luciferian .0001% elite against the entire present and future global population is about to enter the final phase, in which those who are not mass-murdered by injections and starvation will be turned into their (literally) mechanized, soulless slaves. Imagine a synthesis of Brave New World, 1984, The Matrix, and The Hunger Games. The scamdemic was the initiation ritual into their demonic psychopathic fantasies, implemented by force and fraud, and seduction, on the global population. What’s coming is the full liturgy, ending with the arrival of a posthuman world:

Where the Combine of 2022 plans to take us has the appearance, superficially at least, of something like a neo-feudal world, but is more complex than that. The lockdowns were in a sense predictive of the future in the context of the enforced idleness they imposed upon the human race by virtue of the insinuated fear of death arising from a deadly virus. This was, in part, a rehearsal for a world without conventional work. In the early stages of the post-‘pandemic’ world, this model will become part of a trial in which the world’s populations will be invited to consume without producing, to see if it is possible, in practice, to create an economy that operates on a more or less totally mechanised process of production, with a consumer base comprising idle, unproductive consumers who simply spend the money which is skimmed off the top of the transactional wealth accumulation process so that it may serve this manufactured economic model while ensuring that the totality of the world’s wealth and tokens gravitates to and remains within the control of the oligarchs. The objective is not power for the purposes of enrichment, but the other way around: money as the instrument of total power.

Their plan is that the many must submit themselves as instruments of the few — the ‘elite’ which has finally stepped up to sit on the throne recently presumed to have been vacated by the deity. Physically indistinguishable from the rest of mankind, the ‘few’ plan to maintain their dominion by the usurpation of earthbound power, having accumulated most of the earth’s resources so as to leave the majority of men disempowered and bereft, while bribing a sufficiency of willing collaborators and traitors to defend themselves from any possible rebellion.

The super-rich have never wanted to share the planet with those who merely struggled to get by and wished for nothing other than the means to do so and be let alone to do it. They most certainly do not want to share the planet with those they have made poor, and might — some of them anyway — be inclined to seek revenge.

We had displeased our ‘betters,’ who now become our new ‘creators’ — both by our unclean natures and our desire selfishly to exploit the resources of the earth, as we claimed God had permitted us to do. The escalating numbers of the human race as a whole had, in the estimation of the elites, threatened to leave an insufficiency for themselves. The self-proclaimed gods had become alien and hostile to man, desiring all things to be theirs. More precisely, we had outlived our usefulness, for very soon technology would deliver the few of the need to have the many around them. The harmony between the people and the hidden elites had suddenly revealed itself as fictional. Man, as he stands, even at his best, is of limited use to the ‘few’. When it comes to doing what is to be done, technology is more malleable, cheaper, more efficient, adaptable. And technology shows no inclination to rebel. In these circumstances, there has arisen a clear and urgent need to absorb the bulk of the human population into the mechanistic realm, to make them, in effect — and in no sense metaphorically — parts of the machine.

Honestly, I don’t know to handle this. I’d like to stop it. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think it can be stopped. I’d like to prepare for it. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think it’s possible to prepare for it. It’s like putting your head between your legs and hiding under your desk at school in case the bomb is dropped, or like wearing a mask, nothing but psychological and emotional theatre. But Waters insists that this plan is bound to fail because both it and its orchestrators are out of touch with reality, and reality always wins in the end. That it is failing and must fail will be made abundantly clear soon, Waters tells us, but not before “they will have completely dismantled the world as it was.”

One must read Waters and other godly conduits of reality whom God has raised up for us at this time to understand what is happening, not because understanding it means we can stop it, but first and foremost because understanding is the key to being in touch with reality, even if the reality we are in touch with is the unreality of evil—we are obliged as creatures to inhabit reality by knowledge and love of the truth, for no other reason than that it is the Truth. God is Truth. Period. Second, understanding, particularly understanding how things are on the ground, as it were, can protect us from unconsciously abetting the evil through ignorance and imprudence. We can have the best speculative and practical formation in the liberal arts, philosophy, theology, spirituality, etc., along with a good moral character and will, but if we are ignorant to what is happening right in front of us and the conspirators who are doing it, either due to the unavoidable contagion of massive propaganda and social enginering, or because we have our head in the sand or up someone or groups you-know-what, or both, then we, at best, cannot act effecitvely for the good, and at worst, our actions will contribute to the evil against which we are intending to fight.

We must pray, suffer, read, inquire, research, observe, listen, understand, and then act, personally, culturally, socially, politically, legally, and, if need be, coercively and militarily, but always in, by, and with God’s love flowing through us, in the truth. But it may very well be that what we are experiencing is a real chastisement from God, and perhaps the final one to purge the world before the promised Era of Peace. And if this is so, though our grace-inspired acts may mitigate the chastisements, they will still come, and many will suffer tremendous hardships, including those who in God’s eyes do not deserve them.

As I have opined in other essays, IXXI, the Scamdemic, and now the Ukrainsane are essentially counterfeit religions, cults aping the one true religion of Catholicism. They have everything our hearts desire: infallible doctrines, sacraments, rituals, friends, community in the “truth,” moral prescriptions and proscriptions, saints, an eschaton, sacred awe and fear—and for our fallen hearts, enemies and scapegoats. These are prepatory for the ultimate counterfeit religion of the Antichrist, who, I think, is coming very soon. So, so, so many people have embraced these cults, while thinking they are still members in good standing of their previous religions, and being in complete denial that they have willingly initiated themselves into satanic worship. What this amounts to is a final judgment before the Final Judgment. It is akin to the scene in Homer’s Odyssey in which the evil suitors, right before they are all dispatched in a bloodbath by Odysseus and his son Telemachos, are sitting at table ready to feast:

Pallas Athena roused them all to laughter, with no sense of control.
She unhinged their minds, so the laughing from their mouths
came from an alien source, and the meat they ate
became blood-spattered.(5) Their eyes filled up with tears.
All their hearts were filled with thoughts of lamentation.

Right after this public premonition and revelation of their imminent doom, they go back to their feasting as if nothing had happened. They are shown their fate and guilt, for a moment, like a last-ditch effort of mercy granted to them by Athena to repent of their ways and avoid their doom:

Then godlike Theoclymenus addressed them all:

“O you miserable men, what troubles
are you feeling now? Your heads, your faces,
your lower limbs are shrouded in the night.
You’re on fire with grief, faces wet with tears,
fine pedestals and walls have gobs of blood,
the porch is full of ghosts, so is the yard—
ghosts rushing in the dark to Erebus.
Up in the sky the sun has disappeared—
an evil mist is shrouding everything.”

Theoclymenus said these words. But they all laughed,
enjoying themselves at his expense.

Oh you miserable men, with your filthy masks on, suffocating and cowering in fear, begging for the next suicidal command, giving your arm to the poison elixir and your souls to demon-men, cheering the slaughter of innocents by the Nazis you love to hate, offering your babies and children to be murdered in body and soul by Moloch-Gates-Fauci-Schwab, celebrating your enslavement, degradaton, and dehumnization—all just to get a vitual and socially-distanced pat on the back from your fellow slaves and slavemasters—”You’re a good person!”

But Jesus says: “Do you really want this? I am showing you now what it looks like to reject me and my Lordship. It means being tortured and mocked and ruled by cruel, malicious, vampiric demons. There is no other alternative. My yoke is easy and my burden is light, and you will have rest for your souls. Yes, but you must renounce your desire to be praised and accepted by corrupt men. You will be scorned and ridiculed and persecuted by them, but it’s worth it, I tell you. I am the truth. If you want something other than truth, you can have it, I permit you, but I will make it clear exactly what you are choosing. You are choosing Hell. The whole world will celebrate and praise you as a saint, but I won’t. And that’s all that matters, for I am the Truth. And you will know, and I will make sure of this, in the back of your mind, that everything they are saying is a lie. I am giving you this chance, now, to see what it really means to reject me, and giving you the chance to reject this rejection, but after this grace, you will note able to choose Truth.”

Pre-plandemic and pre-Ukrainsane, so, so, so many people, including Church-going Christians, had already rejected Christ by doing their “good” deeds so people could see and praise them, but caring nothing for God’s eye and approval. This is the essence of liberalism. It was so easy to get away with this Phariseeism in the past, but God is no longer allowing it.

“If you reject the Beatitudes and Christ’s easy yoke and light burden of absolute integrity and humility, doing all for my pleasure and no one else’s, and instead embrace the counterfeit God of the Beast of Virtual-signaling Prestige, the hatred of all personal responsibility for your own precious soul, the Luciferian will-to-power and non-serviam of postmodern bourgeoise therapeuticism—the lukewarm I will vomit from my mouth!—you have chosen hell over heaven, right now, and this will be your eternity.

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”

In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it [by technology] and rebels against tradition [especially by moral Subjectivism], resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age [ours? the twenty-first century?] really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger; for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. . . . The real picture is that of one dominant age . . . which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But even within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. . . .

The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. . . .

But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. . . . The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received; they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which overarched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education.

. . . Simple-minded critics may ask Why should you suppose they [the Conditioners] will be such bad men?’ But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. . . . Stepping outside the they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. [Remember Brave New They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Blinded, gagged and bound by confirmation
On this premise we iterate a lie
Why will stay unasked
They know, we know, it doesn’t matter

Barren hollow words, no information
We’re led to believe in self-applied deceit
This trope of ignorance, disinformation
Made to confuse, to light the shortened fuse

Wading through the rubble of ideologies
Cherrypicking madness to the gospel of suckers
Sustenancе for the greatest of idеas
Life is a machine, it will cater to me
Bow, serve, comply

Bared teeth, the lesson is complete
The stench of strange raw meat
Draw acolytes to feast
Rotting thoughts the treat

So who came up with your ideas
Before you spat them out like they were yours
Play the pawn, knowing where hope lies
Where it goes to die

—Meshuggah, “Light the Shortening Fuse”

“Why Truth? Why not rather untruth?”

—Frederick Nietzsche

You may want to read this essay before or after mine. It’s a great companion piece:

Every second brings us closer to death, and thus eternity. Stop reading and say that word. Say it again. Consider its meaning. Consider a never-ending state of being, either never-ending bliss, peace, and joy, or never-ending misery, frustration, and torture. Eternity begins right now, in this and every moment, and we are here undergoing this and all the moments allotted to us to decide, now and especially in our very last moment on earth, what our eternity will be like. God created us to live with Him, one with Him in an unimaginable intimacy, forever, and that forever-intimacy begins now, at this moment, if we want it to. Otherwise, we begin to live in hell, right now, at this moment, by separating ourselves from God through sin, and getting ourselves used to such separation so that when we end up in Hell, it will be no surprise, though we will be drowned in futile regret, relentless sorrow, and impotent rage for all eternity; indeed, we will become nothing but this.

I preface my essay with this because I want to put into perspective the evil we are facing and fighting. IXXI, the plandemic, and the Ukraininsane were and are mass-psychological, mass-terror operations created and orchestrated by a very small group of very evil and/or totally psychopathic people, enabled by another slightly larger group of somewhat evil and/or psychopathically susceptible people, and given mass-energy by a large group of cowardly, physical and psychological comfort-idolatrous people. Mass death and destruction, and eventually, total enslavement, were and are the main goals of the planners, as well as the demons—I mean, literal demons—inciting and energizing and empowering them. They have been largely successful in inflicting unprecedented and unspeakable death and destruction, and the enslavement process is well underway. But as my words at the outset suggest, there is a worse evil than these: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Now, not even Klaus Schwab can do this, but only God, so we should fear only unrepentant disobedience to His will, which is the only action that can put us in hell. And this action is caused by knowing and willing consent to grave evil, to mortal sin.

Those who blew up the buildings on IXXI, created the Sars-Cov 2 virus and the graphene-oxide spikeshot, and who are now trying to destroy Russia, the world economy, and provoke a nuclear holocaust (not sure how many, if any, of these people can take credit for all three) are happy with all the death and destruction they have caused and will continue to cause—absent a global mass resistance and Divine Intervention. They are even happier, I suppose, and most definitely surprised with the level of totalitarian physical and mental control they have gained over the global populace through their monstrous lies. But what Mr. Global or GlobalCap or the Pathocrats (to use the terms of Catherine Fitts, C.J. Hopkins, and Andrzej Łobaczewski respectively) truly want, and this desire of theirs comes directly from the demons they worship, is for us to become like them, to become evil, and for this, they need to do more than merely kill and enslave us. They need to get us to sin, and their chief strategy for this, which they also learned from Satan, is to get us to consent to the evil they are doing to us, that is, to make us, in effect, inflict the evil on ourselves. They want us above all to do this knowing it is evil, knowing that it is evil being done to us, evil that we are, in turn, doing to others, and evil we are doing to ourselves.

Now, how can they do this? Well, obviously they lie—and they lie constantly and always—and their lies need to be believed by the vast majority in order to have the power to murder, destroy, and enslave. They also need us to internalize the lies and construe them as the truth, to accept and live in their constructed reality, the new normal. This is, of course, the result of brainwashing, and they do this through relentless, ubiquitous, and sophisticated propaganda and trauma-based mind control. But when a person has internalized the commands of his oppressors and, say, voluntarily wears a medically useless mask and takes a poisonous injection after being put into a state of psychosis through mass-formation, the evil he inflicts upon himself is not voluntary. He is literally out of his mind and does not know what he is doing. Similarly with the evil that infected people through IXXI (the evils of scapegoating, wars of aggression, and idolatry), and is infecting people through the Ukraininsane. Add to IXXI’s evils the unhinged hatred of Putin—and I’m not saying he’s a good guy—and all things Russian, the siding with actual Nazis which, as several credible news reports have shown, are using Russian-speaking Ukrainians as human shields and blaming Russians for their atrocities (again, I’m not saying the Russian army isn’t also doing evil), and the enabling through this hatred and complicity the real possibility of a nuclear holocaust.

These are plainly the evil, self-and-other destructive actions of brainwashed people, unwitting dupes and useful idiots of the knowing wicked who are pulling their strings. Such evils, directly or indirectly, kill, destroy, and enslave on a massive scale but they won’t land someone in hell unless consented to. And in order to consent to these evils, we must know that they are evil, and choose to believe and do them anyway. So, the only means by which they can get us to consent to these and all the evils they are planning is to bring us in on the lies, as it were. They must make the truth of the evil available to us, even broadcast it to us to some extent, but not so much as to reveal it plainly so that we reject it. And this is precisely what they have done and are doing now.

The absurdity of the official “eighteen hijackers” story of IXXI, the insanity of asymptomatic transmission of a virus and treating healthy people as sick and contagious, the obvious medical uselessness and harm of masks and lockdowns, the clear danger and irrationality of taking an untested experimental injection that doesn’t prevent infection or spread, the mass deaths that are now occurring because of the injections all over the globe, hidden in plain sight, and the fact that the US and NATO are supporting actual nazis, along with a Jewish president who also supports them, engaging in war crimes against Ukrainian civilians (with Facebook now “approving” of posts that support these nazis)—these are all examples of the “truth-giving” propaganda I am talking about. And I don’t think all this is just an unintentional mishap by incompetent propagandists. When someone is confronted with these truths, and he still “believes” the propaganda and does the grave evils to himself and others that it instructs him to do, it may be that he is too far gone to see the truth, a complete victim of brainwashing and so no longer culpable for believing the lies and doing the evil directed by him because he actually believes them to be true and the actions good, and his ignorance is not entirely or seriously culpable.

But it might very well be that he both believes and doesn’t believe the propaganda, both knows and doesn’t know that they are lies, both judges and doesn’t judge that the actions he is doing and plans to do are good. In other words, could it be that this person has consented to the evil, and is simply lying to himself and others? Could it be his “ignorance” is more feigned than real, the result of culpable ignorance? Are there people who have actually asked and answered Nietzsche’s question: “Why Truth? Why not rather untruth?” Are there people who actually don’t believe the IXXI, or Covid, or Ukrain propaganda to be true, since truth is no longer a category of their reality, but believe and obey it anyway?

I am thinking that there may be more of these people than we suspect, and if so, we are seeing the ultimate success of the Enemy. I am not sure how to help people like this, people who, at best, are so worn out and despairful from two years of hell that they are now knowingly and willingly consenting to evil out of sheer exhaustion and lack of courage and self-respect, and at worst, have decided for untruth, other than to keep telling the truth in love, to warn against the wages of sin and encourage them not to give up, and to invite them into a relationship with the God who is Truth and Love, and who loves them so much he was willing to be tortured and murdered for them. Let us consent to this Love by never consenting to any lie or evil, no matter what. Eternity is at stake.

“He scared the hell out of me!” There is nothing more frightening than hell, and that’s because heaven is the perfect opposite, the fullness of love, which casts out all fear. God’s greatest desire is for all the men He created and will create to be in Heaven with Him for eternity, and His greatest sorrow is for any of them to end up in Hell, in eternal separation from Him, in a state of perpetual fear, as well as anger and sadness, the three basic emotions evoked by the presence or expectation of evil. So, God, using demonically possessed billionaires and power-intoxicated psychopaths, is now literally scaring the hell out of people by allowing hell to incarnate itself in a last ditch effort to save them. It’s working for some, with the terrifying emerging totalitarianism waking them up from their habitual neglect of God and their souls. Others, however, mostly establishment professionals and bureaucrats, are embracing hell for the diabolical and sadistic pleasures it affords—torturing, bullying, and scapegoating. And the rest, the herd of compliant sheep, are trading their priceless and unrepeatable gift of life, with all its depths of drama, responsibility, meaning, purpose, mystery, and adventure, for an infantilized life of safety and mindless obedience and conformity, willingly enslaving thereby both their bodies, minds, and spirits to the most evil human beings ever to exist on earth.

I for one am not going to question God’s providential judgment that allowing psychopaths and satanists to create hell on earth, with all the unspeakable horrors we have already witnessed during the past two years and those even worse to come, is necessary for their and our salvation, as well as His glory and inexorable Judgment. It seems to me that God is presenting us with a foretaste, not of the beatific vision, but of the miserific vision, as a kind of pre-death trial to see where our hearts are. How many people in the world actually love God? I hope I’m one of them.

I am a religious person, devout even, and was before the plandemic, but I am not sure how well I was doing pre-plandemic, and how well I would have done if hell didn’t emerge in March of 2020. I surely did not recognize how complacent I was about my own life, the preciousness of every moment and the dramatic significance of every thought and action. I am much less complacent now. I did not recognize then how precious everyone around me was, how each conversation could be the last. I took for granted my freedom to live as I pleased, and even though I tried to live according to God’s will, I was not doing this with the urgency and diligence and humility God requires.

When they came out (when the world was still sane), I watched the Lord of the Rings movies with great enjoyment but also gravity, both yearning and fearing to be caught up in such a cataclysmic drama of good vs. evil, and perhaps being a main protagonist in it. And I read then much end-times theology and apocalyptic literature with an analogous seriousness and thrill. But unless it actually happened, the Great Tribulation, I mean, unless I was forced into it, as it were, I don’t think I would have ever had the magnanimity and courage to seek out the kind of trying circumstances and perilous drama necessary to achieve heroic virtue. I would have been quite content with safe vicarious counterfeits.

What I am trying to say is that for us who recognize that Saruman and Sauron and the vast army of orcs are now at the gates—indeed, they are past them— the time we are now living in is a great gift from God, one of both judgment, mercy, and opportunity. By putting us at the center of Mordor—and perhaps even Tolkien didn’t describe with sufficient depth the evil we are now facing—He is all-but forcing us to be saints, whether it be of the warrior, healer, teacher, leader, encourager, or victim kind. What God is doing with the others who seem now to be aligned with Mordor (Many of these call themselves Christians) whether knowingly or not, is His business. Our job is to try to save them if we can, to pick up the pieces of their ruined lives if and when they wake up, and to fight the enemies of all that is good, true, and beautiful with the courage of Hobbits.

Peter Kwasniewski, Kennedy Hall, Theo Howard, Will Tucker, Matt Gaspers, Stephen Kokx, Anthony Abbate, Chris Jackson, the SSPX, all 58 Sedes, all “recognize and resist,” and all the other trad cultists pharisees in the mortal sin of schism, heading to it, or leading others to it—repent, or go to Hell.

And here is a revised version of my essay that articulates why traditionalism is evil and counterfeit, and why traditionalists are schismatic cultists.

There is no such Thing as Traditional Catholicism

It is only insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical refutation that that person can come to know whether and what he or she knows.

—Alasdair MacIntyre

The inner willingness which is not closed against even the most unpleasant truth, which is really free from bias, ready to make friends with things, open to the proof of all objective existence, not looking at things through a colored lens that allows only such things to pass into the understanding as do not offend our pride and self-complacency

—Dietrich von Hildebrand

Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. They are to be avoided not only as “profane novelties of words,” out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics. Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected. . . . There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim “Christian is my name and Catholic my surname,” only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself.

—Pope Benedict XV

Catholicism is traditional, by definition. There is no such thing as a non or anti-traditional Catholic. And Catholicism is the Tradition. Everything true, good, and beautiful in nature, culture, history, and humanity is present there, for it is the Mystical Body of Christ, the Logos_, who contains everything, and the Holy Spirit is the very soul of the Catholic Church. She is the inspirer, custodian, and guardian of all genuine tradition, for it is in and through her that whatever has ever been said and done and made—that was worth saying and doing and making—is exemplified, supernaturalized, unified, and perfected. The Catholic Church is also the Master Teacher of Tradition, for she is equipped with the teaching authority, the Magisterium, infallible in what it declares for the salvation of souls. Thus, nothing she teaches now can contradict what she has taught in the past, and whatever she transmits from the past to the present, whether doctrine, liturgy, or sacrament, is by definition traditional. And there must be such an infallible guide for human beings regarding what they are to believe and do to fulfill the purpose of their existence, a guide that is visible, historical, institutional, and hierarchical, for without it, and the objective and certain recognizability of it, we would be left to our own subjective and fallen devices. Without the Magisterium, we could never even know, let alone fulfill, God’s salvific will for man. Thus, God has ensured all men have access to a clear and certain understanding of His will. It’s all right there in the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. What God hasn’t ensured—because He literally cannot—is our free and loving obedience to what He has given us clearly and certainly to understand. For that, although He gives us His grace to assist us, it is entirely up to us whether we submit our wills to His.

Because we have a clear teaching magisterium that cannot err, with a Pope possessing ultimate authority to define all doctrine and settle all ecclesial matters, the Catholic Church is One. There are no “denominations” in Catholicism. Yes, there is demographic, ethnic, cultural, and liturgical diversity, but it is only in non-essentials. In essentials, every Church is the same, and every Catholic believes the same doctrines and worships in the same way. So why is it that there is a not inconsiderable group of baptized Catholics who identify themselves as traditional Catholics? Now, there are, of course, Spanish Catholics and Irish Catholics and American Catholics, intellectual Catholics and working-class Catholics, Chaldean-rite Catholics, Anglican-Ordinariate, and Byzantine Catholics, but considering what we have written above, should “traditional Catholic” be added to this list, for isn’t being Catholic just to be traditional, by definition?

Perhaps these people aim merely to distinguish themselves as orthodox Catholics in contrast to those who claim to be Catholic but are obviously not, that is, obvious heretics or apostates who reject some or all of Catholic tradition. But here’s the thing: traditionalists always contrast themselves with what they call “Novus-Ordo” or “Conciliar” Catholics, that is, those who do accept all the teachings of the Church, both pre- and post-Vatican II. It is just that they do not regularly attend the so-called “Traditional Latin Mass” nor think that Vatican II and, say, natural family planning are problematic. And I know all this because I was once one of these, and boy did I love thinking of myself as traditional, and being called a traditional Catholic, for there was nothing I wanted less than to be lumped in with those Catholics.

So, “traditional Catholic” is a sociological category, not an ecclesial one. It is a category of the mind, as EMJ likes to say. It is a distinction without a difference. There is no such thing as a “traditional” Catholic, only a Catholic. Those who self-identify as such imply that they are the only true Catholics and thus are really inner-circle, pathologically arrogant, schismatic cultists. They are gnostics. This can be seen in their unwillingness or incapacity to take a step back, to adopt a Socratic stance toward their commitment and allegiance to their traditionalist narrative and critique of the post-conciliar Church, which may be a true narrative and accurate critique, but it is not taught by the Magisterium, and so does not demand religious obedience. Having some Socratic distance from it is not a sin, but the gnostic traditionalist thinks it is. Traditionalist narratives, explanations, criticisms, attitudes, etc., are founded on nothing more certain than fallible judgments on concrete historical and ecclesial particulars. If you combine this kind of unwillingness and incapacity to take a step back, this absolutely unyielding stance regarding one’s traditionalist allegiance, as opposed to simply having the ordinary allegiance to the Catholic Church, with an a priori and intractable unwillingness to attend even just an occasional well-celebrated, reverent Novus Ordo (for, attendance at a Novus Ordo, regardless of the quality of its celebration, constitutes for them “spiritual contamination,” à la Donatism), you have the recipe for the spiritual poison of gnostic traditionalism.

Of course, one can exclusively attend the Tridentine Mass if one so chooses, but only because it is an approved option. It is not the case, as the gnostic traditionalist thinks, that those with different approved commitments are somehow less Catholic, or that one’s commitment to the traditional Mass doesn’t depend entirely on the Church’s pleasure to permit and endorse such a commitment, but merely on one’s own gnostic insight that this is what “true” Catholics do. Such an attitude reflects neo-Donatism rather than Catholicism, and in today’s ecclesial situation, it can rightly be called gnosticism.

The essential mentality of the gnostic traditionalist attitude is “No salvation outside of us.” Now, one asks, has any bona fide traditionalist group, outside of the crazy 1958 sedevacantists, ever claimed such a thing? Of course, true heretics and schismatics rarely make explicit such damning schismatic confessions. Perhaps the most fanatical and prideful of them do, but the average schismatic tends to hold such sentiments within. However, heresies and an absence of charity are often hidden implicitly in words and actions, and a good theological dialectician can draw them out. Is there not some evidence of a no-salvation-outside-of-us mentality in the various independent traditionalist movements and personages? And even within the approved traditionalist milieu? For example, if one does not happen to buy a certain historical, political, or ecclesial narrative wholesale, one that is, at best, debatable, and certainly not de fide, then, well, one is just not a real Catholic, even if he happens to attend the Tridentine Mass, defend the social reign of Christ the King, and show forth abundant fruits of holiness in his life. This is a common sentiment. Again, SSPXers say that anyone who attends non-SSPX Masses is duped, a useful idiot of the modernists, and just not authentically Catholic. I have witnessed FSSP Catholics make their intense moral disapproval known if you attend a Novus Ordo, no matter how reverent and orthodox it may be celebrated, and no matter the legitimacy of one’s reasons. They may not declare the Novus Ordo invalid, but their attitude and behavior speak louder than their words.

What these traditionalists are missing is the deeply personal and prudential nature of the judgment as to how intensely and absolutely one should embrace a particular traditionalist, historical, and ecclesial narrative and practice, for such narratives are inherently fallible, and such practices are not morally obligatory— neither comes with a magisterial mandate. If the TLM is as superior and good as the Novus Ordo is inferior and bad, then the Church would have taught this authoritatively. But she never did. Like one’s embrace of a particular theological school, one is morally free in one’s choice in these matters, as long as one remains within orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Catholics are perfectly within their rights either to lessen or increase the vehemence of their loyalty to a particular, non-infallible, traditionalist polemic, strategy, or practice, including the frequency of one’s attendance at the Tridentine Mass, whenever they judge it to be God’s will and beneficial for the salvation of their souls. Indeed, I think one is morally obligated to relax his traditionalist vehemence if he senses spiritual danger to his soul, the danger of making a peculiar brand of idiosyncratic traditionalism a universal precept of the Church, of having a greater attachment to it than to Christ and to His Church, in all her members. A detached attitude toward any of our opinions, attachments, devotions, etc. that are not clearly consonant with indisputable Church dogma and Magisterium-approved practices is spiritually healthy; even what we consider indisputable “common sense” needs to be skeptically examined once in a while to ensure it really is.

Traditionalism has become a gnostic ideology that, even though sometimes correct in its analysis of the crisis in the Church and world, nevertheless makes one spiritually sick, as one becomes more attached to the traditionalist movement, its narratives, personages, publications, polemics, criticisms, etc., than to the Church herself and to Christ. The apotheosis of idiosyncrasy is a formidable American temptation. Add to this the temptations to an “inner-circle” pride, an overly critical and judgmental spirit, and an “I-am-attending-the-superior-Mass-of-the-Ages” self-consciousness. These are quite present in traditionalist circles. There is a certain fanaticism that prevents the traditional Catholic soul from experiencing deep, simple, humble prayer and self-forgetfulness. The phrase “Catholic Pharisee” comes to mind.

Being imprisoned in his own magisterial thoughts, the gnostic Catholic traditionalist is existentially isolated and alienated from the fullness of being that only intimate union with the Church and Christ, and obedience to the Magisterium, can provide. Because the gnostic traditionalist approaches Tradition with an inherently anti-traditional stance of soul—I am the final arbiter—Tradition can do little to help him; for, although he goes through all the traditionalist motions and rituals and mouths all the trad talking points, he is not in existential and spiritual contact with Truth. He has developed an impenetrable shell over his soul, exacerbated by his personal sins and his habituation in the modernist spirit of liberal culture. And traditionalism is in truth just liberalism, i.e., anti-authority, the privatization of truth, and the autonomous, unencumbered “Catholic” individual. This shell must first be removed before Tradition can penetrate his soul, but he is too busy delving deeper and deeper into what he considers authentically “traditional Catholicism” to realize that he is digging a deeper and deeper hole to a self-created Hell.

The ultimate irony is that the gnostic traditionalist is really an ultra-modernist and anti-traditionalist, a liberal, because he has put himself in a position gnostically above all received Tradition, above all that would evoke in his soul a non-deliberative, non-critical, non-analytical, childlike “fiat” to the order of supernatural reality as it is incarnated in the visible Catholic Church under the reigning Pope. For the trads it is Sola Traditio, with trads, not the Magisterium, having the final interpretive say. This is Protestant. Dom Charbel Pazat de Lys, OSB, describes how certain Catholics who consider themselves to be “against the Enlightenment” are actually its unwitting advocates:

T]here are two forms of “exaggerated conservatism,” whose aims are opposed to each other but who work things out in similar fashion: those who hold that the old Roman liturgy represents the culmination of liturgical progress, which cannot be surpassed and should remain untouched, and those who think the same about the new postconciliar reforms, as if any reform of the reform would necessarily represent a backward step. In both cases, it is assumed that there has been a complete break, whereby those who hold these views are, without being aware of this, taking a view of history inherited from the Enlightenment, which sees it not as a chain at the end of which we stand, but as a kind of display cabinet from the shelves of which we make our choice, a choice determined in the end by the man and his rational thinking. (Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, ed. Alcuin Reid, OSB [Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003], pp. 100-101)

The gnostic traditionalist’s “choice” for tradition is not salvific for him, even though it may be the objectively right choice, because the choice comes from the wrong spiritual place: it is not a humble, loving, childlike fiat of Faith, but a puffed-up, hyper-conscious, modernist choice of pride. G.K. Chesterton said that “all goods look better when they look like gifts,” but the gnostic traditionalist cannot see any good as a gift, because to do so, he would have to admit that he doesn’t deserve it. One can never choose a gift. The Jansenist Port Royal nuns of France were once described as “pure as angels, and proud as devils.” And Edith Stein wrote, “Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And so do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”

Catholics must be especially alert to the unrecognized—because much more subtle—malignant effects of having been habituated to the gnostic “tradition” of anti-tradition, infecting both the post-conciliar Church and the culture at large. Our daily immersion in the Luciferian regimes of today, with their state-sponsored empty shrines dedicated to the worship of nothing, can place our souls in an existentially alienating relation to the living Tradition of the Church, no matter how often we attend the Tridentine Mass or read pre-Vatican II encyclicals. The temptation of gnostic traditionalism is dangerous, and, because of the smoky confusion and abysmal lack of authority in the human element of the Catholic Church today, we lovers of Catholic tradition must be especially wary. We must be wary of whatever endangers our childlike receptivity to the Church’s Tradition and a sense of the “giftness” of salvation. We must be wary of choosing Tradition, like modern, self-conscious spiritual “adults.” Instead, we must aspire to receive it, like Teresian spiritual children.

It must be said: The documents of Vatican II do not, because they cannot, contain any errors in faith or morals, and the “new Mass” is not, and cannot be, in any way, evil! Both of these fall under the indefectible protection of the Holy Ghost, preserving all officially promulgated dogmas and sacraments from any error or intrinsic evil (of course, this protection does not apply to non-traditional interpretations of Vatican II teachings or to mistranslations or abuses of the Novus Ordo Missae). Traditionalists must accept this simple truth, but they don’t. This makes them both schismatic and heretical. Nevertheless, the seeming novelty of some elements in Vatican II and the Novus Ordo did provide an occasion for the faithful to seem to make a choice for “Tradition” over this seeming novelty. Lovers of Tradition have thus been placed in the eminently non-traditional stance of having to choose what is not supposed to be chosen, but only received. Even if they choose rightly, dismissing the apparent novelty and adhering to the Tradition, they make such a choice with a consciousness of being “on their own,” seemingly in spite of the guidance and counsel of those who presently rule Holy Mother Church.

It is akin to the abused teenager who must choose whether to run away from home and live on his own or remain under the authority of his parents. There are adverse consequences for both choices, but the mere consideration of such a choice is deeply traumatic in itself. The false dichotomy with which Catholics appear to be faced is bound to cause psychological and spiritual disorders, even among the most good-willed and spiritually vigilant of Catholics. The idea of being forced by the authorities of the Church into a choice between remaining at home and suffering or running away and suffering is spiritually traumatic. Like in the case of the abused teenager, regardless of what choice is made, one feels “on one’s own” in the making of it, and such an attitude is antithetical to the kind of childlike trust Catholics should have toward their Mother. Of course, being treated with contempt by some of the Church’s hierarchy, as those Catholics devoted to the 1962 Mass have sometimes been treated by certain progressivist Churchmen, is an unconscionable evil. However, such evil can lead to other unseen, subtle evils that arise in response to it. An attitude of “I will never allow myself to be subject to that kind of treatment anymore!” can lead to heresy and schism as much as an attitude of cowardly resignation to such treatment, and not defending our Lord when He needs defending.

It is a consciousness of having to “choose” to be and subscribe to a certain type or quality of Catholicism, whether the “new” Catholicism of the Vatican II “spirit,” or the “old” Catholicism of pre-Council tradition. There is a certain inescapability to this choice-consciousness: Even if one’s choice is to remain with Tradition, which is the only good choice because the object of the choice is good, plain, and simple, eschewing any inconsistent innovations and deviations, it is still an unnatural choice in a subjective sense, one that shouldn’t exist, and would not exist without the Church mysteriously having created the occasion for it. To me, this is the real smoke of Satan, because it gets you coming or going. It is ultimately a mystery, the Passion of the Church prophesied by mystics and described in the Catechism.

This is deeply traumatic to the soul, and its fallout manifests in different ways depending on the spiritual and dispositional particularities of each person. But it really is a “great façade,” because it is ultimately an illusion. There really is no choice whatsoever, nor can there be. Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and His Church is His body—neither can change. All there is is ordinary Catholicism. God-pleasing, ordinary Catholicism can exist within the milieu of the revised Roman Rite as well as the unrevised . I say, “can” deliberately, for I mean it for both cases. Some Novus Ordo ecclesial milieus are spiritually bad, but it is not because the Novus Ordo Mass is bad; it can’t be because the Novus Ordo Mass is God-pleasing in itself, containing nothing heretical or evil. The Magisterium has told us so. It is, rather, because of abuses of the rite, misbehavior on the part of the priests and people, and acquiescence to the enormous temptation to desacralize, humanize, immanentize, and horizontalize the liturgy. Irreverence, blasphemy, sloth, worldliness: these are the spiritual poisons one imbibes in a milieu that embodies the choice for the “new.”

On the other hand, some Tridentine Mass ecclesial milieus can be just as spiritually dangerous. Of course, it is not because of the Tridentine Mass per se, but because of the hyper-consciousness of “being a Tridentine Mass Catholic,” a consciousness that is, I must say, unavoidable in such milieus now that the original and traumatic choice-consciousness has infected the entire Church. It is quite unnatural and debilitating to have to fight off this consciousness, and it can have a spiritually damaging effect, with the sins of schism and pride, and the vices of paranoia, judgment, harshness, lack of meekness, a spirit of criticism, Jansenism, and the like being the predominant spiritual fallout from habituation in this milieu embodying a “choice” for the old.

In sum, gnosticism is what underlies the traditionalist cult today. The core of gnosticism is believing and acting based solely on yourself as an authority, because you, not God, are good and holy and the source of truth, while pretending to others and to yourself that you are just obeying a higher authority, even the highest authority. Catholic traditionalism is just gnosticism larping as pious obedience. No traditionalist belief or practice is held or done because the Magisterium actually commands it. There is no magisterial command to attend only the Latin Mass, or to despise the Novus Ordo, or to have 4+ children no matter the circumstances, yet the traditionalists hold to these as if they were commanded by Christ. No, they are obeying only their inner circle cult of spiritual superiority.

Catholic Traditionalism is thus an ideology and a cult. Its reactionary, tendentious narrative and purely human, erroneous doctrines are unquestioned and treated as reality itself. It has its commissars and intellectuals. It pretends to be just faithful Catholicism in its pure form, but it is nothing of the sort. It is founded upon the satanic lie that the Magisterium can call good what is actually evil, and vice versa. The Magisterium has definitely and infallibly called Vatican II and the revised Roman Missal good, as well as NFP and the Divine Mercy devotion, but Trad Cultists insist these are evil. This is nothing less than blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the unforgivable sin. It is this sin that is at the heart of the traditionalist cult. Catholic traditionalism is an elitist, inner-circle, schismatic cult, a self-justifying, arbitrary, fake aristocracy. It is an ideology grounded in nothing more than arrogant complacency in spiritual superiority. It’s the product of neurotic, scrupulous, narcissistic, insecure souls—fueled by pride—and it is nothing else than neo-Pharisaism. Jesus harshly condemned it when He was on Earth, and He does so today from Heaven. Pope Leo XIV has mediated this condemnation recently in his excommunication of the SSPX.

There is just the magisterium, pre- and post-1965; just the Church; just the dogmatic teachings pre- and post-1962; and just the approved liturgies. Preferences are permitted among what is optional, so preferring the TLM does not make one a trad cultist, and preferring the Novus Ordo does not make one a modernist heretic. But rejecting the magisterium after 1962, and refusing to be in communion with those who don’t, and rejecting the magisterium before 1962 and refusing to be in communion with those who don’t, does make one a heretic and schismatic and thus outside the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.

And it’s not just outright magisterial rejection that makes one a schismatic and a cultist. It’s also a suspicion of the magisterium and its official judgments and decisions. One will accept it only if it meets one’s approval. This is not a religious submission of intellect and will. And then there is the magisterium that both trads and progressives invent in their sick minds and subcultures. It’s a sin to go to the Novus Ordo. It’s a sin not to have four or more children. It’s a sin to treat your wife as an equal instead of as an inferior human being (Aquinas taught this, and he was embarrassingly wrong). It’s a sin for a mother to ever work for money and contribute to the household—okay, trad cultist Tim Gordon. It’s a sin to say the Divine Mercy chaplet—okay, trad cultist Stephen Kokx. Ad nauseum and infernum. For the progressivists, it’s a sin to condemn sodomy—ok sodomite promoting James Martin.

Yes, trads, some “St. Typical”parishes sometimes evince irreverence and have emasculating music and hardly any sense of the supernatural, feeling less like a sacred ritual sacrifice than a celebration of the precious community, with hardly any talk of sin (unless it be wokish ones) and the possibility of damnation, with the “presider” acting like an entertainer. But your typical TLM-only parish can be quite gloomy, guilt-ridden, scrupulous, misogynistic, inner circle, cultish, reactionary, fear-based, coercive, schismatic, uncharitable, snobby, joyless, judgy, dour, and sad. “Traditional” priests can be quite cold, impersonal, neurotic, and arrogant, superior to you and needing to be treated that way, with confessions that are shaming and abusive, and homilies that are either shame and guilt-inducing or replete with scapegoating of “those Catholics” and cheerleading for the in-crowd.

Of course, there are parishes, priests, and lay people, both NO and TLM, that evince none of these ideological toxins. But Catholic discourse and subcultures, both “left” and “right”, are becoming more and more ideological and cultish. A typical “trad” now means a neurotic and prideful ideological Pharisee who thinks having 4 or more children (which he makes sure to tell everyone every other day and in all his social media bios) and treating his wife like a a child-slave makes him superior and gives him a ticket to heaven, and who despises the Novus Ordo, St. John Paul II, and St. Faustina.

Jesus condemned and mocked both the Sadducees and the Pharisees, for they were man-made cults of hypocrisy and abuse. These represent the superficially opposing but deeply similar counterfeits of authentic magisterial Catholicism whose trademark is ideological idiocy: lgbtq advocacy and that hell is not eternal, on the one hand, and men are superior to women and the Novus Ordo is evil, on the other. The evil spirit in both is one of disobedience, pride, and elitist supremacy. Trads have a deep-seated problem with authority, which is a problem with the will, not the intellect. They are an inner circle cult as evil and fraudulent as modernism. The more they proof-text their positions, the deeper they entrench themselves in the cult. All cultists become cultists because they get something from being in the cult, a psychological or emotional or social or financial good, and they place the good they are getting above the ultimate good of truth. Until they recognize this, all dialectical engagement just trads just makes them more cultish. The problem is not logic or reason but the will. The madman, as Chesterton said, has lost everything except Logic. Trads will prooftext their way all the way to hell. Erudite (and not so erudite) ideologues use their redoubtable rhetorical skills and high IQs to manipulate their audience into thinking just as they do, not to help us realize the truth for ourselves. This is propaganda. They turn Catholicism into an ideology. None is more guilty of this than Peter Kwasniewski, the reigning cult leader of traditionalism. These toxic personal and online subcultures cloak and counterfeit Catholic Reality.

Here’s a prime example of trad ideology: fertility Calvinism. Trophy wives is an evil thing. But trophy number-of-children is even worse. Nothing wrong with having many children, if it is a decision made with full, non-manipulating and non-coercive consent of wife and husband, and based upon prudence. It’s not ok if the ideology behind the decision is “God demands that we have as many children as we can and as fast as possible!!” That’s neurotic and fanatical Pharisee trad ideology. Even worse if the motivation is to be part of the “cool club.” “Look at us, we have 4+ children!” (4 is the magic number). “We are part of the elect! “Do you think you are a better Catholic because you have more children than others? Do you look down on, say, a family of “only” 3 and think—“mid” Catholic? Do you cite your 4+ number of children in your bio as if it were a resume builder? Do you mention it at least once a day so people know you’re a real Catholic? “John Supercatholic is the father of 8.” Why do we need to know this? Why not just “John is a father and husband”? Father of three? Not so much. Never print that. That’s shameful in these circles. Best not to mention it. Many classical and robustly Catholic schools and colleges doing great work for God and neighbor, are, nevertheless, notorious for having faculty bios that always culminate in the 4+ number of children brag. Chesterton Academies comes to mind. Number of children is used as a resume builder. If it’s less than four, and they mention the number, it’s only if the couple is very young—then it’s tolerable. X tweet: “Man, tough flu this season, all six of my children got it.” Not “All of my children got it”—never that if you’ve got more than three. You’ll notice that Catholics in these circles or who aspire to be in them with “only” three children hardly ever announce their number because of shame. It shows that you’re secular and selfish at best, and you used NFP! You just don’t trust in Providence.

“Good afternoon candidate. You’re here to interview for the editor position of Trad Magazine. I have some questions for you. I’ll ask the most important one first: How many children do you have?”

“Gee, well, three. But I’m a good Catholic and I know my stuff and I’m published and….”

“Really? you’re 40 years old and you should at least have four children by now—three is just not gonna cut it. We have competition you know. The editor of John Paul II the Heretic has 10 children and he’s only 30. Now that’s a Catholic. Next!”

Seldom discussed, however, is the dysfunction of many of these Catholic families, with neglected and abused children, many of whom act out later in life and lose the faith or become pathologically neurotic, and then there are the tortured, mentally ill mothers. But the externals look so holy! What happens when the children at some point become aware that they were valued more as trophies or resume builders than children, or as tokens of a neurotic Calvinist compulsion to insist that one is of the elect or better than “those Catholics.” And you can’t challenge them on this. They hate you for exposing their cult, and they think you’re just jealous because you’re not in the fertility elite. It is precisely the Phariseeism that enraged Our Lord. It’s a bizarre Catholic Calvinism substituting fertility for worldly prosperity. Good for you for having a large family, if that’s indeed what God wanted for you and your wife. But knowing many dysfunctional large Catholic families with abused wives and neglected, thoroughly neurotic children, perhaps some NFP was in God’s plan. “But no, NFP is Vatican II! And I wouldn’t get to be in the elite 4+ children club!

What was the Pharisees’ paradigm? Whatever it was, it made them desire to destroy Jesus and persecute His followers. They were the God-appointed leaders of the Jews! Their paradigm was the very Revelation of God, and they were the epitome of loyalty, piety, courage, and devotion to God! Well, yes, it was, and they were—if Jesus was only a human being. If he were God, however, then their virtues were vices, and the “Jews,” as St. John calls those Hebrews who rejected Jesus, became, not God’s Bride, but the devil’s prostitute, not the Church of Yahweh, but the “synagogue of Satan.” Saul was a prisoner to such a paradigm, and nothing but an unforeseen and violent encounter with who, to his diseased spirit and intellect, was the radically other, a Jewish man claiming to be God, could liberate him. If Saul had been allowed to remain in the isolated, blinded paradigm of the “Jewishdom” of his day, the way in which “traditional Catholics” would like to remain in the isolating “Christendoms” of their neuroses, fears, and gnostic certainties, his blindness would never have been revealed to him, and he would never have become St. Paul, the apostle to the Jewish other, the Gentile. Christ Himself had to break Saul out of his idolatrous paradigm, which was indeed not one of authentic Mosaic Judaism but a rabbinical, proto-Talmudic fanaticism of purely human origin. This had to occur violently against his will, but we have the chance to invite Christ freely into our minds, by inviting the salvific “others”—ones that we would rather not meet— into our intimacy as they are providentially “forced” upon us by Our Lord in our modern pluralistic world—as neighbors. Anything else is fear of contamination, otherwise known as schism, the ecclesial sin against charity.

As the Antichrist approaches, prepared for by the apotheosis of his worldly minions, of which we have had a foretaste in the totalitarian plandemic, on pause for now, but bound to replay any moment at a much higher speed and volume, he will rule over and exploit and annihilate all our paltry paradigms. We will all be in the position of the Apostles when the Truth Incarnate asks each of us personally, “Who do you say that I am?” At that moment, no paradigm will do, no proof-texting will suffice, and no tribal in-house ideology will help you. Let us all prepare ourselves now for that moment by destroying our idols and relativizing our paradigms, with the knowledge that when it all comes down, we are all personally responsible for recognizing, loving, and obeying Truth, and although we are tradition-constituted rational animals who can only make rational judgments within and by the help of inherited and chosen paradigms of thought, we are required and enabled ultimately to transcend these paradigms by God Himself, who wants to know whom we really love at the core of our hearts, a place beyond any paradigm, where God meets us intimately and immediately. Let us prepare for the meeting, for it is coming soon.

Glenn W. Olsen’s “The Turn to Transcendence” is a must-read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death, and replace it with the only alternative: a civilization of love turned to the Face of Transcendence revealed in Jesus Christ.

The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First Century by Glenn W. Olsen (404 pages, Catholic University of America Press, 2010)

We may assert without any paradox that every branch of science pursued home would lead to the other sciences, science to poetry, poetry and science to ethics, and then to politics and even to religion on its human side. Everything is in everything, and partitions are only possible by abstraction…. When one knows something thoroughly, provided one has some inkling of the rest, this rest in its full extent gains by the probing of its depths. All abysses resemble one another, and all foundations have communicating passages. —A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

To review this phenomenal book, it is necessary, a la T.S. Eliot, to begin at the end:

In terms of what is most central for us, we are to work for a proper expression of the relation of time and eternity, immanence and transcendence. Rather than flee the world, we are to continue the Ignatian program of finding God in all things. If we receive a tawdry and banal ecclesiastical architecture, we are to reassert the idea that the Church must both express—say, in images of the communion of saints in which we stand—the fact that we are on pilgrimage and have no abiding place; but that here in this place the Lord of the universe is truly present. Whether in church or not, we are to oppose a music or art that is lost in noisiness or busyness, in being caught up in a mindless urge to change for its own sake, with a music or art which either helps bring another world to us, or us to another world. Finally, we are to realize that our first home is the Church, not any other community. Though political duties or politics are not to be neglected, our principle effort must be to build up the Church. In doing this we are uniting earth and heaven, anticipating in this life the world to come (325).

To get a sense of Glenn W. Olsen’s The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First Century, imagine each political, aesthetic, moral, intellectual, and spiritual prescription in this paragraph fleshed out in 325 pages of exhaustively researched, exquisitely documented, and creatively synthesized historical, theological, philosophical, psychological, architectural, sociological, and social analysis. What we have here is the ripe fruit of decades of study and prayer by one of the foremost thinkers of our time. Dr. Olsen portrays personal, institutional, intellectual, and cultural protagonists and antagonists in a world-dramatic struggle for and against Transcendence: “My own view is that all along, in all periods, desacralization and resacralization have taken place simultaneously” (ix). To read this book is to stand on the shoulders of a giant and see vast swaths of human action, creativity, and contemplation in a double pattern of centripetal and centrifugal motion around the eternally still center of God. This is a, perhaps the, “history of history” for our time, rivaled perhaps—perhaps—only by the monumental, zeitgeist changing A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

The Summae of old were the Bibles of knowledge: we have now no Summae, and no one among us is capable of writing one. Everything is in chaos. But at least, if a collective Summa is premature, every man who thinks and really desires to know can try to establish his personal Summa, that is, to introduce order into his knowledge by an appeal to the principles of order; in a word, by philosophizing, and by crowning his philosophy with a concise but profound theology.

Add history to Sertillanges’ recipe, and here in this book we have a new Summa for our postmodern, historically hyper-aware yet philosophically and theologically challenged age.

For those progressivists or traditionalists looking for a facile celebration or condemnation of modernity, they should choose another author; Dr. Olsen is as detached and impartial a historian as he is a faithful and devoted Catholic. This is no personal polemic:

The approach this book takes is intended to be neither reactionary nor modernist, that is, neither disapproving of all break with tradition nor desiring systematic abandonment of the past. The question rather is how, under the conditions of modern life, some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time (x).

On the other hand, Dr. Olsen is no Pollyanna about the grave problems inherent in modernity, and because he recognizes the peculiar potential for evil of the globalist, postmodern, technocratic, totalitarian, “atheist-with-a-smile” secularism, its capacity virtually to eclipse the transcendent for a vast majority of people, his book is simultaneously description, proscription, and prescription. Dr. Olsen tracks the trajectory history has followed to its present location, but he attempts to redirect its course to meet God intimately along the way: “The author’s hope is to stimulate reconsideration of the most basic premises of our life in society today… a religion unwilling to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars, ‘face to face’ against an enveloping secular culture, is destined for oblivion” (xi).

The book contains six chapters, including a rich introduction that sets out the present state of affairs in the West with respect to the Transcendent and in light of Christopher Dawson’s work on the relationship of religious and culture (Dr. Olsen is a preeminent Dawson scholar). The picture is not a pretty one: “Without a response to Dawson’s problem, the relation of religion and mass culture, it seems that the future will be divided between jihad and ‘McWorld’” (22). What both of these apparently antithetical scenarios have in common is a hidden nihilistic fundamentalism, a collapse of the transcendent into the immanent whereby only naked human will, disguised as religious fervor and sentimentalist humanism, is left. Jihadic and secular fundamentalism, both inherently violent and inhumane, are what shall remain of authentic religious civilizations if the Incarnation of the God-man is rejected. Archbishop Javier Martinez Gran­ada, part of the Communio theological school of which Dr. Olsen is both student and teacher, has written:

Nihilism is today not a philosophy, it is above all a practice, and a practice of suicide even if is a soft suicide. It is the suicide of the depressed. It is also a practice of violence. The secular society lives in daily violence, violence with reality. This violence shows that nihilism cannot and does not correspond to our being. But it shows also, in a very concrete way, how the secular society annihilates itself by engendering the very monsters that terrify it most and that itself hates most: the twin monsters of fundamentalism and terrorism. After 11th September 2001 and 11th March 2004, it is more and more obvious that Islamic terrorism, like Islamic fundamentalism, by all its Muslim coloring and a certain vague connection with traditional Muslim ideas and practices, is not understandable or thinkable without the West, it is mostly a creature of Western secular ideologies. It is pragmatic nihilism using Islam instrumentally, very much like the emergent modern nation-states used in their own political interest a Church institution like the Inquisition.

Chapter Two is entitled “Three Premises,” and Dr. Olsen outlines his thesis in three claims:

1) the claim that there is a natural fit between a religious and a communal existence, that is, the claim for the superiority of a ‘communitarian’ over and ‘individualistic’ form of life for nurturing the religious individual: 2) the claim that, despite increasing attacks on ideas of progress during the past century and the demonstration of the inadequacy of such ideas for understanding history and politics, they largely continue, to our detriment, to shape our lives; and 3) the claim that politics must be founded on a non- or anti-utopian view of the world. (40)

What is most striking about Dr. Olsen is his synthetic acumen: One finds citations ranging from obscure but important historical texts and cutting-edge theological and philosophical tomes, to the latest news articles and book reviews (the New York Review of Books is his favorite lens on the contemporary scene), to works of literary criticism, sociological analysis, and musicology. And all of this myriad, multi-perspective research is put at the service of Dr. Olsen’s penetrating intellect and towering vantage. His is an analysis that both actively negotiates and scours historical particularity and biographical idiosyncrasy, and passively contemplates and digests great vistas of philosophical and theological wisdom.

In the three main chapters, Dr. Olsen provides a diagnosis of “Modernism” in its various symptoms and causes: historical, economic, cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, theological, and existential; he then muses on the “Music of the Spheres,” contrasting the ancient and medieval connection among God, cosmos, and art with its modern severance; mourning the “Loss of Transcendence,” Dr. Olsen provides a tour de force intellectual history of modern theoretical and practical atheism; and finally with “Alternatives,” a chapter worth the price of the book, Dr. Olsen brings together his vast scholarship and creative power in a prophetic sketch of what lies ahead for Western man if he continues to reject transcendence while setting foundations for an alternative model: a “second Enlightenment” in which religion and culture, grace and nature, history and idea, Church and state, person and community, and transcendence and immanence become—this time around—married friends and lovers, properly related and integrated unto the full flourishing of man and glory of God.

The only criticism I have for the book is that perhaps it is too documented, which is to say, Dr. Olsen’s scholarship gets the better of him: The reader is witness to such a multitude of source citations and scholarly opinions in the footnotes that it is sometimes a distraction from Dr. Olsen’s own voice. (For example, on just about every page one finds a citation from the New York Review of Books, and one often feels overwhelmed with the need to read everything Dr. Olsen has read, an impossibility for most of us). This is, however, a very minor criticism of what is, if any contemporary work is, a must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death, and replace it with the only alternative, a civilization of love turned to the Face of Transcendence revealed in Jesus Christ.

__________

Catholicism is traditional, by definition. There is no such thing as a non or anti-traditional Catholic. And Catholicism is the Tradition. Everything true, good, and beautiful in nature, culture, history, and humanity is present there, for it is the Mystical Body of Christ, the Logos_, who contains everything, and the Holy Spirit is the very soul of the Catholic Church. She is the inspirer, custodian, and guardian of all genuine tradition, for it is in and through her that whatever has ever been said and done and made—that was worth saying and doing and making—is exemplified, supernaturalized, unified, and perfected. The Catholic Church is also the Master Teacher of Tradition, for she is equipped with the teaching authority, the Magisterium, infallible in what it declares for the salvation of souls. Thus, nothing she teaches now can contradict what she has taught in the past, and whatever she transmits from the past to the present, whether doctrine, liturgy, or sacrament, is by definition traditional. And there must be such an infallible guide for human beings regarding what they are to believe and do to fulfill the purpose of their existence, a guide that is visible, historical, institutional, and hierarchical, for without it, and the objective and certain recognizability of it, we would be left to our own subjective and fallen devices. Without the Magisterium, we could never even know, let alone fulfill, God’s salvific will for man. Thus, God has ensured all men have access to a clear and certain understanding of His will. It’s all right there in the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. What God hasn’t ensured—because He literally cannot—is our free and loving obedience to what He has given us clearly and certainly to understand. For that, although He gives us His grace to assist us, it is entirely up to us whether we submit our wills to His.

Because we have a clear teaching magisterium that cannot err, with a Pope possessing ultimate authority to define all doctrine and settle all ecclesial matters, the Catholic Church is One. There are no “denominations” in Catholicism. Yes, there is demographic, ethnic, cultural, and liturgical diversity, but it is only in non-essentials. In essentials, every Church is the same, and every Catholic believes the same doctrines and worships in the same way. So why is it that there is a not inconsiderable group of baptized Catholics who identify themselves as traditional Catholics? Now, there are, of course, Spanish Catholics and Irish Catholics and American Catholics, intellectual Catholics and working-class Catholics, Chaldean-rite Catholics, Anglican-Ordinariate, and Byzantine Catholics, but considering what we have written above, should “traditional Catholic” be added to this list, for isn’t being Catholic just to be traditional, by definition?

Perhaps these people aim merely to distinguish themselves as orthodox Catholics in contrast to those who claim to be Catholic but are obviously not, that is, obvious heretics or apostates who reject some or all of Catholic tradition. But here’s the thing: traditionalists always contrast themselves with what they call “Novus-Ordo” or “Conciliar” Catholics, that is, those who do accept all the teachings of the Church, both pre- and post-Vatican II. It is just that they do not regularly attend the so-called “Traditional Latin Mass” nor think that Vatican II and, say, natural family planning are problematic. And I know all this because I was once one of these, and boy did I love thinking of myself as traditional, and being called a traditional Catholic, for there was nothing I wanted less than to be lumped in with those “Catholics.”

Andrew Mioni was also once a traditional Catholic. And he has written two excellent books explaining both why he left traditionalism and why it is wrong, why “traditional Catholic” is at best a meaningless phrase and at worst the badge of an influential group of malevolent schismatics deceiving a growing number of baptized and good-willed Catholics and leading them into schism. His first book, Altar Against Altar: An Analysis of Catholic Traditionalism (En Route Press, 2024), is a compelling refutation of all the typical traditionalist arguments, revealing them to be nothing more than propaganda talking points based on half-truths, logical fallacies, and tendentious interpretations of Scripture and magisterial teaching. The fundamental error underlying the “recognize and resist,” SSPX, and 1958 sedevacantist narratives is that the “Vatican II Church” has, to some extent, defected, that is, it is no longer a trustworthy teacher of saving truth and sure source of saving grace. To save their souls, baptized Catholics must, to some extent, reject this official counterfeit and find the “true” Church. Traditionalists either “recognize” the current “conciliar pope” but “resist” him and his teachings and guidance, or reject him tout court, along with all his predecessors since Pius XII, as antipopes. Of course, such behavior would be reasonable if the Catholic Church had indeed defected, or had gone completely underground. But only an ideologue detached from reality would believe this, and that is what traditionalists are, as I wrote in my blurb for the book: “Catholic traditionalism is not Catholicism but an ideological cult, the reactionary mirror-image of Catholic progressivism, also anti-Catholic. If you tend to agree with this but would like rigorous and principled arguments that prove its truth, Mioni’s book is for you.” I’m more polemical than Mioni, so here’s how I would put the upshot of Mioni’s book: Sorry, trad cultists, Vatican II did not teach any errors of doctrine. No, trad Pharisees, the 1962 Missal is not the “Mass of the Ages,” for no liturgy is set in stone, and the Roman Missal has always been in a continual state of growth and revision. As the 2,147 out of the 2,151 Vatican II bishops agreed, it needed reform again, and so the Church reformed it. Yes, trad dissenters, the 1969 Missal is actually good and holy as promulgated, else the Church is defective. No, trad gnostics, the Divine Mercy devotion is not a counterfeit of the Sacred Heart, NFP is not Catholic contraception, and Dignitatis Humanae’s right to religious liberty does not contradict previous teaching that “error has no rights” and the unchangeable political ideal of the Catholic confessional state.

Now, most Catholics who are drawn to the traditional Catholic movement are not schismatic and don’t want to be. What they want is just authentic Catholicism, and no one is assured of getting this in the typical mainstream parish in America today. And this has been the case since the 1970s. This is the main reason I became a traditionalist in my twenties. One day long ago I attended an evening of recollection in Long Island led by Father John Perricone, an icon of tradionalism in the tri-state area then and now, and, though I am a cradle Catholic, it was the first time I had ever experienced Bendiction and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, let alone celebrated with all solemnity, in Latin, and with a bunch of young Catholic men in attendance who took it very seriously. These were my people. I discovered there was another Catholicism I never knew about, one that promised an escape from the irreverence, dilution, emasculation, and sentimentality of “St. Typical” parish.

However, and it took me decades to figure this out, it was out of the Sadducee progressivist pan and into the Pharisee traditionalist fryer: gloom, scrupulosity, Jansenism, misogyny, inner circleism, fertility cultism, reactionariness, misogyny, fear-mongering, joylessness, and lack of charity. Confession was often shaming and abusive, and the homilies made me both scrupulous and arrogant. God was always displeased with me, and I better look that way when kneeling at Mass, but I was at least better than those Catholics who do not wear suits to mass when it is 90 degrees and think three children is perhaps enough. Although I suspected this many years ago when I came out of the traditionalist cult, Mioni’s book helped me to justify my intuition that there is just Catholicism, with both progressivism and traditionalism nothing but mirror-image ideological counterfeits. Mioni is our generation’s James Likoudis, who fought the traditionalists in the 80s.

Mioni’s latest book is Ignorance of Things Divine: The True Crisis of Faith – And Its Remedy – According to the Magisterium, and here he provides an extended and rigorous refutation of one of the main traditionalist canards and talking points. Mioni:

Many Catholics today speak of a crisis in the Church. They speak of a crisis of faith, as evidenced by empty pews, a general disinterest in religion, and a display of spiritual apathy in the face of the distractions and comforts of the world. They speak of a crisis of the liturgy, as can be seen in casual, irreverent, and even sometimes sacrilegious offerings of the Sacrifice of the Mass. They speak of a vocations crisis, displayed by low numbers of men entering seminaries and women entering religious life. It can hardly be disputed that a spiritual crisis afflicts the Church and has for some time. . . . After attempting to navigate the chaos in the years following Vatican II, a subset of Catholics came to believe that the Council itself had introduced this crisis of faith into the Church. It seemed to them that the heresy of Modernism, condemned in the early 20th century by Pope St. Pius X, had infiltrated the Church and spread to the upper echelons of the hierarchy, taking root over the next several decades until the Holy See itself was infected by this heresy’s errors. Vatican II appeared to be proof of this, as the years before the Council saw a Church in its stately glory, while the years that followed were marred by doctrinal, liturgical, and catechetical disorder. Vatican II had intended to bring the Church out into the world, but it appeared as though the opposite had occurred. This subset of Catholics believed that the Council was either ambiguous in its declarations at best, or nefarious in its intentions at worst, and attempted to compromise Catholic teaching by diluting or even contradicting current doctrine. These Catholics believed that a return to the “traditional”, pre-Vatican II ways would restore order in the Church, and thus they became known as the “traditionalists.”

In the opening chapter from this collection of essays countering traditionalism, Mioni states briefly his thesis about the crisis: “Its origins are more historical in scope and were festering in the Church long before the council was convened.” Mioni proves his thesis by marshalling numerous magisterial writings from late eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, and early twentieth-century popes bemoaning the state of the Church and world during their reigns, revealing that “the Magisterium had been consistently ringing the alarm bells on a crisis that was infecting the Church long before the 1960s.” Consider this passage about the state of the world in 1829 by Pius VIII:

[T]he Roman See is assailed and the bonds of unity are, every day, being severed. The authority of the Church is weakened and the protectors of things sacred are snatched away and held in contempt. The holy precepts are despised, the celebration of divine offices is ridiculed, and the worship of God is cursed by the sinner. All things which concern religion are relegated to the fables of old women and the superstitions of priests. [...] [A]ll fear of religion has been lost, all discipline of morals has been abandoned, the sanctity of pure doctrine has been contested, and the rights of the sacred and of the civil powers have been trampled upon.

And this passage about the state of Catholics in 1891 by Leo XIII: “It is indeed a cause of great sorrow that so many should be deterred and led astray by error and enmity to God; that so many should be indifferent to all forms of religion, and should finally become estranged from faith; that so many Catholics should be such in name only, and should pay to religion no honor or worship.” Perhaps Vatican II and the Novus Ordo were not the source of all our problems. Perhaps things were not so great in the 1950s. Perhaps the Western world was not then on its way to embracing the social reign of Christ the King, even though Fulton Sheen’s television show was watched by millions. Perhaps the Church wasn’t bursting with fervent and courageous and informed orthodox Catholics.

Reading the warnings and lamentations of these Popes articulated with such urgency and gravity, it is clear that the Church has been in big trouble for a long time, and though Vatican I was a noble and vigorous effort to stem the tide of materialism, naturalism, religious indifferentism, lukewarm Catholicism, and hatred of authority (all topics covered in the book), there was a great need for a new approach to deal with the juggernaut of modernity and the ongoing crisis in the Church. In short, the central claim of the traditionalists is wrong, and it is not so much Mioni who makes the case as pre-Vatican II “traditional” popes. There is some irony here.

Mionio thinks the 2022 sedevacantist position means that Jesus has abandoned His Church, and he characterizes it as “gnostic.” He may be right. But I just do not see how it is possible to interpret Bergoglio’s behavior as pope—and not only his official teachings, e.g., the incredibly evil act of telling a billion Catholics and the entire world that injecting oneself with an experimental and highly dangerous substance was an “act of love”—as being in continuity with the Magisterium, both pre- and post-Vatican II, or even with his being a faithful Catholic. But I also do not know how being without an acting pope for thirteen years and then with no pope at all for four years is even possible, yet here we possibly are. I can’t say I know for sure that Benedict XVI never resigned, or that Bergoglio was a persistent heretic, but it sure looks like it, and I have not come across any arguments that have proven otherwise. Erik Moyer’s argument invoking “Universal Peaceful Acceptance” is the strongest I have seen:

Bur Father Faré’s book is also compelling.

Thus, I find myself among a very small number of anti-traditionalists with sympathy for 2022 sedevacantism, who, unlike the progressivist anti-traditionalists, love and obey all the teachings of the Magisterium, not just those after Vatican II tendentiously misinterpreted to contradict older ones, and who love all valid Catholic rites, not just the Novus Ordo celebrated in the least traditional way possible. If we add to the mix my love for Luisa Piccarreta and her amazing teachings on the Divine Will, whom I have defended against the malicious slander of traditionalist Father James Mawdsley, then the number of Catholics in my group shrinks even more. I’m a tradition-loving Catholic that hates traditionalism, an academic philosopher that thinks Candace Owens is a better philosopher in terms of love of truth and courage than most academics, a trained philosopher and researcher that believes and promotes many “conspiracy theories.” I am a lover of both Vatican II, the Novus Ordo, and the Council of Trent and the Latin Mass, as well as Gregorian chant, Beethoven AND Erik B and Rakim and post-metal—and I also very much get the “Jewish question,” and I hold E. Michael Jones in high regard for his scholarship and disdain the many “conservative” Catholic academics and influencers who have slandered him (Larry Chapp blocked me on Facebook because I linked to an EMJ interview). I hold to a rigorous traditional morality, spirituality, philosophy, and liturgical discipline, but I absolutely despise the suit-jacket-and-tie fanaticism, cultishness, inner-circleness, scrupulosity, and lugubriousness of the typical Latin Mass Only parish and Latin Mass Only Catholic. I adore St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and think that 1958 sedevacantism is as insane as it is wicked. But I am open to the possibility that 2022 sedevacantism is true.

Being a Catholic means obeying the Magisterium unquestionably in matters where it is authoritative, and discovering the truth of things courageously in those matters up to us to figure out. It’s about the Truth, period. It’s not about one’s precious identity and looking good on social media to the “right” people. Mioni’s book will help Catholics just to be Catholics, and avoid the counterfeits.

They demanded of their rulers that they remain in constant cocoons, silky and guarded by earthly authority. They did not ask for wings to soar into the sunlight, and the ominous threats of full existence. They rejected freedom for hell.

—Taylor Caldwell, Dialogues With the Devil

Truth is so obscured nowadays and lies so well established, that unless we love the truth we shall never see it.

—Blaise Pascal

Just when I am about to admire someone for their truth-telling and intellectual integrity in one important area of reality, I discover that this person tows the ideological party line in another. For example, Larry Chapp is great on the errors and stupidity of Catholic traditionalism and progressivism, no doubt due to his formation in the superb Communio school of philosophy and theology, but he shows himself either a brainwashed ideologue or just a complete ignoramus about geopolitics. He likes to call certain fellow Catholics with superior intellects and courage “antisemites,” such as E. Michael Jones, and he actually believes, or says he believes, that Osama bin Laden took down the World Trade Center, and he mocks those who say otherwise as, you guessed it, conspiracy theorists. In his recent discussion with Kale Zelden on the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, Israel was hardly brought up, let alone criticized, even though there is good evidence that Trump attacked Iran because Netanyahu told him to, and the war is nothing but the next chapter in Israel’s Zionist expansion and destruction agenda. And then there are the Catholic traditionalists, who rightly denounce the progressives as fake and gay, but at the price of rejecting and disobeying the Magisterium after 1962, whether in the “recognize and resist” or 1958 sede mode—they are essentially the same in their rejection of the Magisterium after 1962. But then there are those, like Andrew Mioni and Andrew Likoudis, who have astutely pointed out the problems with both traditionalism and progressivism, but agree with the recognize-and-resist traditonalists that it is simply out of the question even to suspect Bergoglio and Prevost of being antipopes. Some traditionalists get a lot right on important theological, ecclesial, and geopolitical issues, but are literally insane on other ones, such as the nature of women. Carrie Prejean Boller has recently stood up heroically and publicly for Catholicism against Zionist hatred (still waiting for Bishop Barron to defend her, so far crickets), but has been mocked by fellow Catholic “patriarchs” for daring to be more intelligent and courageous than most men, particularly them: Here’s Anthony Abbate: “I will not support the Anti Zionist Catholic broad. She belongs at home with her family. Not as a spokesperson on the public stage. I don’t care that I agree with her message.” Women, all women, should never be in the public square, never work outside the home, and this is because they are ontologically inferior to men, less rational, and less virtuous. This is literally what they believe, as if the pre-Vatican-II Church taught it, which it didn’t. And even if it did, today’s magisterium in 2026, which was once today’s magisterium in, say, 1950, does not. Outside the Catholic world, there is Naomi Wolf, who was heroic in her truth-telling during the Covid totalitarianism, but is now fanatically defending Chabad and attacking Tucker Carlson, who merely presented some valid criticisms and suspicions that it may not be just some squeaky-clean philanthropic charity.

I could give more examples. The point here is that though I may be wrong about the claims I make above, I make them because I see them as being true, and justifiably so. I don’t make these claims because I like them, or because they are cool, or because they are what my tribe thinks, or because these are what “real Catholics,” or “educated people,” or “good Americans” believe. I have studied 911 extensively, and all the evidence indicates that it was a false-flag terror operation, mendaciously and maliciously blaming and scapegoating Muslims. There is no other compelling explanation. Anyone interested in the truth with at least average intelligence, not ideologically compromised or brainwashed, not morally corrupted, sufficiently skeptical of official narratives, and with sufficient research and internet skills will come to the same conclusion. The JFK assassination and the murder of Charlie Kirk—similar results. Concerning the current Iran war, it is evidently a war for Israel, not America—all you need to do is listen to Tucker Carlson’s masterful monologue of March 3, 2026. He brings the receipts. There is not much room for debate here. It’s just an obvious truth easily discoverable with a little research, but again, only if you are docile to reality, not too brainwashed, good-willed, and unconcerned about “what people will say.” For so many of these “complex” issues, it really is just the Naked Emperor for all to see.

About Catholic traditionalism: The Magisterium has not and cannot teach error, otherwise it has defected, which it cannot do, as we know because the Church tells us. It’s that simple. This is a basic Catholic doctrine. If you deny this, you are not Catholic. Thus, Vatican II did not teach doctrinal error because it could not have, and the Novus Ordo Missae, promulgated by Pope Paul VI as the latest revision of the Roman Rite of Mass, is intrisically true, good and beautiful, cannot harm souls, and thus must be loved, obeyed, and celebrated by Catholics, along with all the other rites of the Church, including the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, when permitted by the local Bishop. “But look, here’s a clown mass, and the USCCB is telling us that Nostra aetate condemns supercessionism—this means that we must reject the Novus Ordo and Vatican II!” Sorry, but no. Abuse of rubrics doesn’t invalidate the rubrics, and the USCCB’s interpretation of a magisterial document is not magisterial. “But what if Paul VI wasn’t a real pope? That would explain the heresies in Vatican II and the evil of the new mass.” But this is insanity. I don’t dignify the 58 sedes by arguing with them. It’s like arguing with an asylum inmate who insists he is Napoleon.

On the issue of women: The Church does not teach that women are in any way inferior to men, and her most recent magisterial teachings, especially those of St. John Paul II, make it clear that they are not only equal in dignity, but also in rationality and virtue. “But St. Thomas Aquinas taught that femininity is inferior to masculinity!” Yes, he did, and he was completely and embarrassingly wrong. Do we really even need the Church to tell us now that women are equal to men in rationality and virtue? Just look around. “But why are women magisterially instructed to be subordinate to their husbands? Why does St. Paul tell us that ‘woman was made for man, not man for woman’ and that ‘the glory of woman is man, and the glory of man is God’? Why did Jesus become a man, not a woman? Why did Eve come second, and Adam first? The obvious reason is that women are, though fully human, I admit, inferior to men, and I think I’ll side with St. Thomas Aquinas on this one.” Well, the Church doesn’t teach this, and if it were the only rational justification for these theological truths and women’s subordinate position in marriage and, seemingly, social reality in general, it would clearly teach it. It has taken a long time for the human element of the Church to catch up to its divine essence on the nature of women, but with St. John Paul II, it has: masculinity and femininity are equal and complementary perfections, husbands and wives are called to mutual submission, and women naturally belong in both the home as mothers and in the public square as professionals. If you can’t or won’t see this, you are simply being disobedient to both reality and the Magisterium.

But the point of all this is not to articulate yet another debatable “position” on these issues. It is to lament—and excoriate—the intellectual treason that is being committed by Catholic and other public intellectuals and influencers. The essence of this treason is to subordinate the search for and communication of truth, which is the sine qua non, summa bonum, and ration d’etre of the vocation of the public intellectual and influencer, to something else, whether that be tribal allegiance, personal prestige, disordered emotion, or ideology. It is the same-old sophistry and dishonesty that Socrates exposed and was murdered for exposing, the same-old Phariseeism and hypocrisy that Jesus Christ unmasked and was murdered for unmasking. It is a great evil, the greatest one actually, and a diabolical one, literally. Dia-bolos means to “throw across,” to divide. Divided, disintegrated, compromised, Catholics and other men of good will are no match for the enemies of the human race who now rule over us, and we will be sitting ducks for the Antichrist, their final boss, who is coming soon.

Let’s take the present “controversy” over Candace Owens. Candace is a recent Catholic convert and influencer who was fired from Daily Wire in 2024 for critiquing Zionism, condemning past and present Zionist crimes, and exposing Zionism as an immoral and anti-Christian ideology and zionists as fake conservatives and fake Christians. Of course, those who fired her and those who support it say she was fired because she exposed herself as an “antisemite.” Since then, Candace has become more popular than ever, and it is because she is a talented and courageous investigative journalist who speaks truth to power and directs her talents and energy to unmasking the vast network of coordinated lies and liars, crimes and criminals, at the heart of geopolitical power today. She is a warrior of and for truth, in the trenches. You would think that she, an ordinary women and mother, would be supported by seasoned and trained warriors of truth, the credentialed Catholic intellectuals, the philosophers and theologians and historians who should serve as her commanders and generals, providing the expert guidance and military intelligence, in the mode of rigorous and big-picture philosophical research, that she needs most effectively to wage her trench warfare.

Instead, these intellectuals have, for the most part, either been silent during the massive attacks on her character and integrity or have joined the chorus of denigration and slander. Here’s Dr. Thomas Mirus, the head of Catholicculture.org: “Would it be inappropriate to have a longer period of scrutiny for high-profile converts? Perhaps discriminating against public figures would be wrong, but it's not good to have people like Owens instantly becoming a huge scandal for the Church after converting.” A huge scandal? The only scandal here is the cowardice and treason of Catholic intellectuals like Mirus throwing a fellow Catholic under the bus for courageous truth-telling because it might look bad to his emasculated tribe of “conservative” Catholic sophists to support her. (I should add that Mirus defends Aquinas’ ridiculous view of women, which I just learned debating him on X). Naomi Wolf, a heroic truth-teller and activist during and after the Covid scamdemic, as was Candace, also sides with her tribal ideology against investigation of truth by slandering her as an antisemite just for daring to question the agenda of Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism emphasizing intellectual contemplation and kabbalistic theology, an organization once headed by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who once explained that, “The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression, ‘Let us differentiate.’…We have a case between totally different species…The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of (members) of all nations of the world…A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity…The entire creation of a non-Jew is only for the sake of the Jews…” Hey Naomi, do you agree with this?

So, we have self-identified tradition-loving Catholics rejecting their own Magisterium and denigrating women, seemingly heroic Jewish truth-tellers on one issue towing their tribal ideological party line on another, apparent Catholic truth-lovers unmasking the schismatic essence of Catholic traditionalism but dogmatically supporting the obvious heresies and evil agenda of a likely anti-pope, otherwise exemplary Catholic intellectual warriors slandering and betraying a fellow Catholic truth-warrior merely for exposing the evil geopolitical agenda of certain groups and the truth about their actual crimes, the precise agenda and sort of crimes that follow logically and inevitably from the very satanic ideologies they have researched and unmasked in the Catholic academy. This is all diabolical, and it is just what Satan wants.

Stop curating your beliefs to match the identity tribe you happen to like the most. Just search for the truth, find it, and tell it. I’ve tried to do this, and it has excluded me from just about every identity tribe: I’m a tradition-loving Catholic that hates traditionalism, an academic philosopher that thinks Candace Owens is a better philosopher in terms of love of truth and courage than most academics, a trained philosopher and researcher that believes and promotes many “conspiracy theories.” I am a lover of both Vatican II, the Novus Ordo, and the Latin Mass, as well as gregorian chant-Arvo Part AND post-metal—and I also very much get the “Jewish question.” I hold to a rigorous traditional morality, spirituality, philosophy, and liturgical discipline, but I absolutely despise the suit-jacket-and-tie fanaticism, cultishness, inner-circleness, scrupulosity, and lugubriousness of the typical Latin Mass. I adore St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and think that 1958 sedevacantism is as insane as it is wicked. But I utterly despise Bergoglio, and though I don’t know for sure, I treat him like an antipope. Prevost? I’m still waiting.

Right now, we are witnessing a diabolical war with Iran on behalf of two diabolical regimes of power, Israel and the United States. The innocent citizens in Israel, the United States, Iran, and the world are the ones who will suffer the most, of course, for this war is designed to bring about the rebuilding of the Third Temple in Jerusalem and then the summoning of Antichrist, who, with his minions—think the Epstein Files—will usher in the culmination of all evil before it is all vanquished by the return of Jesus Christ in Glory. This war had been prevented up till now, as Candace Owens has compellingly argued, by the powerful influence for truth and goodness of Charlie Kirk (which was the main reason they hired, as it appears from Candace’s impeccable and exhaustive investigation, the lesbian groomer, child trafficking, psychopath Erika Kirk to be trained as a fake Christian conservative and be his handler), who was publicly assassinated in a satanic occult human sacrifice ritual to invoke the demonic power necessary to deceive the world and inaugurate the war. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are risking their lives as I write this to expose all this, and by doing so, hope to awaken enough godly people to the truth and thereby, by the power of awakened consciousness and conscience, and the actions following from it, vanquish the evil. The devil only has power when hidden and feared, but when he is named and confronted, he goes back to Hell. We must stop this diabolical division, this treason against truth and truth-tellers. We must have a radical Socratic openness to inquiry, especially when the conclusions of our inquiries challenge our tribal allegiances, our pride, our prestige, and threaten our good name. This is where we have to have courage and trust in God. Only truth matters now.

It is only insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical refutation that that person can come to know whether and what he or she knows.

—Alasdair MacIntyre

The inner willingness which is not closed against even the most unpleasant truth, which is really free from bias, ready to make friends with things, open to the proof of all objective existence, not looking at things through a colored lens that allows only such things to pass into the understanding as do not offend our pride and self-complacency

—Dietrich von Hildebrand

Catholics should abstain from certain appellations which have recently been brought into use to distinguish one group of Catholics from another. They are to be avoided not only as “profane novelties of words,” out of harmony with both truth and justice, but also because they give rise to great trouble and confusion among Catholics. Such is the nature of Catholicism that it does not admit of more or less, but must be held as a whole or as a whole rejected. . . . There is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism: it is quite enough for each one to proclaim “Christian is my name and Catholic my surname,” only let him endeavor to be in reality what he calls himself.

—Pope Benedict XV

Catholicism is traditional, by definition. There is no such thing as a non or anti-traditional Catholic. And Catholicism is the Tradition. Everything true, good, and beautiful in nature, culture, history, and humanity is present there, for it is the Mystical Body of Christ, the Logos_, who contains everything, and the Holy Spirit is the very soul of the Catholic Church. She is the inspirer, custodian, and guardian of all genuine tradition, for it is in and through her that whatever has ever been said and done and made—that was worth saying and doing and making—is exemplified, supernaturalized, unified, and perfected. The Catholic Church is also the Master Teacher of Tradition, for she is equipped with the teaching authority, the Magisterium, infallible in what it declares for the salvation of souls. Thus, nothing she teaches now can contradict what she has taught in the past, and whatever she transmits from the past to the present, whether doctrine, liturgy, or sacrament, is by definition traditional. And there must be such an infallible guide for human beings regarding what they are to believe and do to fulfill the purpose of their existence, a guide that is visible, historical, institutional, and hierarchical, for without it, and the objective and certain recognizability of it, we would be left to our own subjective and fallen devices. Without the Magisterium, we could never even know, let alone fulfill, God’s salvific will for man. Thus, God has ensured all men have access to a clear and certain understanding of His will. It’s all right there in the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. What God hasn’t ensured—because He literally cannot—is our free and loving obedience to what He has given us clearly and certainly to understand. For that, although He gives us His grace to assist us, it is entirely up to us whether we submit our wills to His.

Because we have a clear teaching magisterium that cannot err, with a Pope possessing ultimate authority to define all doctrine and settle all ecclesial matters, the Catholic Church is One. There are no “denominations” in Catholicism. Yes, there is demographic, ethnic, cultural, and liturgical diversity, but it is only in non-essentials. In essentials, every Church is the same, and every Catholic believes the same doctrines and worships in the same way. So why is it that there is a not inconsiderable group of baptized Catholics who identify themselves as traditional Catholics? Now, there are, of course, Spanish Catholics and Irish Catholics and American Catholics, intellectual Catholics and working-class Catholics, Chaldean-rite Catholics, Anglican-Ordinariate, and Byzantine Catholics, but considering what we have written above, should “traditional Catholic” be added to this list, for isn’t being Catholic just to be traditional, by definition?

Perhaps these people aim merely to distinguish themselves as orthodox Catholics in contrast to those who claim to be Catholic but are obviously not, that is, obvious heretics or apostates who reject some or all of Catholic tradition. But here’s the thing: traditionalists always contrast themselves with what they call “Novus-Ordo” or “Conciliar” Catholics, that is, those who do accept all the teachings of the Church, both pre- and post-Vatican II. It is just that they do not regularly attend the so-called “Traditional Latin Mass” nor think that Vatican II and, say, natural family planning are problematic. And I know all this because I was once one of these, and boy did I love thinking of myself as traditional, and being called a traditional Catholic, for there was nothing I wanted less than to be lumped in with those Catholics.

So, “traditional Catholic” is a sociological category, not an ecclesial one. It is a category of the mind, as EMJ likes to say. It is a distinction without a difference. There is no such thing as a “traditional” Catholic, only a Catholic. Those who self-identify as such imply that they are the only true Catholics and thus are really inner-circle, pathologically arrogant, schismatic cultists. They are gnostics. This can be seen in their unwillingness or incapacity to take a step back, to adopt a Socratic stance toward their commitment and allegiance to their traditionalist narrative and critique of the post-conciliar Church, which may be a true narrative and accurate critique, but it is not taught by the Magisterium, and so does not demand religious obedience. Having some Socratic distance from it is not a sin, but the gnostic traditionalist thinks it is. Traditionalist narratives, explanations, criticisms, attitudes, etc., are founded on nothing more certain than fallible judgments on concrete historical and ecclesial particulars. If you combine this kind of unwillingness and incapacity to take a step back, this absolutely unyielding stance regarding one’s traditionalist allegiance, as opposed to simply having the ordinary allegiance to the Catholic Church, with an a priori and intractable unwillingness to attend even just an occasional well-celebrated, reverent Novus Ordo (for, attendance at a Novus Ordo, regardless of the quality of its celebration, constitutes for them “spiritual contamination,” à la Donatism), you have the recipe for the spiritual poison of gnostic traditionalism.

Of course, one can exclusively attend the Tridentine Mass if one so chooses, but only because it is an approved option. It is not the case, as the gnostic traditionalist thinks, that those with different approved commitments are somehow less Catholic, or that one’s commitment to the traditional Mass doesn’t depend entirely on the Church’s pleasure to permit and endorse such a commitment, but merely on one’s own gnostic insight that this is what “true” Catholics do. Such an attitude reflects neo-Donatism rather than Catholicism, and in today’s ecclesial situation, it can rightly be called gnosticism.

The essential mentality of the gnostic traditionalist attitude is “No salvation outside of us.” Now, one asks, has any bona fide traditionalist group, outside of the crazy 1958 sedevacantists, ever claimed such a thing? Of course, true heretics and schismatics rarely make explicit such damning schismatic confessions. Perhaps the most fanatical and prideful of them do, but the average schismatic tends to hold such sentiments within. However, heresies and an absence of charity are often hidden implicitly in words and actions, and a good theological dialectician can draw them out. Is there not some evidence of a no-salvation-outside-of-us mentality in the various independent traditionalist movements and personages? And even within the approved traditionalist milieu? For example, if one does not happen to buy a certain historical, political, or ecclesial narrative wholesale, one that is, at best, debatable, and certainly not de fide, then, well, one is just not a real Catholic, even if he happens to attend the Tridentine Mass, defend the social reign of Christ the King, and show forth abundant fruits of holiness in his life. This is a common sentiment. Again, SSPXers say that anyone who attends non-SSPX Masses is duped, a useful idiot of the modernists, and just not authentically Catholic. I have witnessed FSSP Catholics make their intense moral disapproval known if you attend a Novus Ordo, no matter how reverent and orthodox it may be celebrated, and no matter the legitimacy of one’s reasons. They may not declare the Novus Ordo invalid, but their attitude and behavior speak louder than their words.

What these traditionalists are missing is the deeply personal and prudential nature of the judgment as to how intensely and absolutely one should embrace a particular traditionalist, historical, and ecclesial narrative and practice, for such narratives are inherently fallible, and such practices are not morally obligatory— neither comes with a magisterial mandate. If the TLM is as superior and good as the Novus Ordo is inferior and bad, then the Church would have taught this authoritatively. But she never did. Like one’s embrace of a particular theological school, one is morally free in one’s choice in these matters, as long as one remains within orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Catholics are perfectly within their rights either to lessen or increase the vehemence of their loyalty to a particular, non-infallible, traditionalist polemic, strategy, or practice, including the frequency of one’s attendance at the Tridentine Mass, whenever they judge it to be God’s will and beneficial for the salvation of their souls. Indeed, I think one is morally obligated to relax his traditionalist vehemence if he senses spiritual danger to his soul, the danger of making a peculiar brand of idiosyncratic traditionalism a universal precept of the Church, of having a greater attachment to it than to Christ and to His Church, in all her members. A detached attitude toward any of our opinions, attachments, devotions, etc. that are not clearly consonant with indisputable Church dogma and Magisterium-approved practices is spiritually healthy; even what we consider indisputable “common sense” needs to be skeptically examined once in a while to ensure it really is.

Traditionalism has become a gnostic ideology that, even though sometimes correct in its analysis of the crisis in the Church and world, nevertheless makes one spiritually sick, as one becomes more attached to the traditionalist movement, its narratives, personages, publications, polemics, criticisms, etc., than to the Church herself and to Christ. The apotheosis of idiosyncrasy is a formidable American temptation. Add to this the temptations to an “inner-circle” pride, an overly critical and judgmental spirit, and an “I-am-attending-the-superior-Mass-of-the-Ages” self-consciousness. These are quite present in traditionalist circles. There is a certain fanaticism that prevents the traditional Catholic soul from experiencing deep, simple, humble prayer and self-forgetfulness. The phrase “Catholic Pharisee” comes to mind.

Being imprisoned in his own magisterial thoughts, the gnostic Catholic traditionalist is existentially isolated and alienated from the fullness of being that only intimate union with the Church and Christ, and obedience to the Magisterium, can provide. Because the gnostic traditionalist approaches Tradition with an inherently anti-traditional stance of soul—I am the final arbiter—Tradition can do little to help him; for, although he goes through all the traditionalist motions and rituals and mouths all the trad talking points, he is not in existential and spiritual contact with Truth. He has developed an impenetrable shell over his soul, exacerbated by his personal sins and his habituation in the modernist spirit of liberal culture. And traditionalism is in truth just liberalism, i.e., anti-authority, the privatization of truth, and the autonomous, unencumbered “Catholic” individual. This shell must first be removed before Tradition can penetrate his soul, but he is too busy delving deeper and deeper into what he considers authentically “traditional Catholicism” to realize that he is digging a deeper and deeper hole to a self-created Hell.

The ultimate irony is that the gnostic traditionalist is really an ultra-modernist and anti-traditionalist, a liberal, because he has put himself in a position gnostically above all received Tradition, above all that would evoke in his soul a non-deliberative, non-critical, non-analytical, childlike “fiat” to the order of supernatural reality as it is incarnated in the visible Catholic Church under the reigning Pope (if he is actually reigning—I do think that there is a good case to be made that Bergoglio was an antipope, and such a suspicion has nothing to do with traditionalism), as well as a fiat to the dogmatic inerrancy of Vatican II and the validity and non-evilness of the Novus Ordo Mass as initially promulgated). Sola Traditio, with me, the trad, not the Magisterium, having the final interpretive say. This is Protestant. Dom Charbel Pazat de Lys, OSB, describes how certain Catholics who consider themselves to be “against the Enlightenment” are actually its unwitting advocates:

T]here are two forms of “exaggerated conservatism,” whose aims are opposed to each other but who work things out in similar fashion: those who hold that the old Roman liturgy represents the culmination of liturgical progress, which cannot be surpassed and should remain untouched, and those who think the same about the new postconciliar reforms, as if any reform of the reform would necessarily represent a backward step. In both cases, it is assumed that there has been a complete break, whereby those who hold these views are, without being aware of this, taking a view of history inherited from the Enlightenment, which sees it not as a chain at the end of which we stand, but as a kind of display cabinet from the shelves of which we make our choice, a choice determined in the end by the man and his rational thinking. (Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy with Cardinal Ratzinger, ed. Alcuin Reid, OSB [Farnborough: Saint Michael’s Abbey Press, 2003], pp. 100-101)

The gnostic traditionalist’s “choice” for tradition is not salvific for him, even though it may be the objectively right choice, because the choice comes from the wrong spiritual place: it is not a humble, loving, childlike fiat of Faith, but a puffed-up, hyper-conscious, modernist choice of pride. G.K. Chesterton said that “all goods look better when they look like gifts,” but the gnostic traditionalist cannot see any good as a gift, because to do so, he would have to admit that he doesn’t deserve it. One can never choose a gift. The Jansenist Port Royal nuns of France were once described as “pure as angels, and proud as devils.” And Edith Stein wrote, “Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And so do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie.”

Catholics must be especially alert to the unrecognized—because much more subtle—malignant effects of having been habituated to the gnostic “tradition” of anti-tradition, infecting both the post-conciliar Church and the culture at large. Our daily immersion in the Luciferian regimes of today, with their state-sponsored empty shrines dedicated to the worship of nothing, can place our souls in an existentially alienating relation to the living Tradition of the Church, no matter how often we attend the Tridentine Mass or read pre-Vatican II encyclicals. The temptation of gnostic traditionalism is dangerous, and, because of the smoky confusion and abysmal lack of authority in the human element of the Catholic Church today, we lovers of Catholic tradition must be especially wary. We must be wary of whatever endangers our childlike receptivity to the Church’s Tradition and a sense of the “giftness” of salvation. We must be wary of choosing Tradition, like modern, self-conscious spiritual “adults.” Instead, we must aspire to receive it, like Teresian spiritual children.

It must be said: The documents of Vatican II do not, because they cannot, contain any errors in faith or morals, and the “new Mass” is not, and cannot be, in any way, evil! Both of these fall under the indefectible protection of the Holy Ghost, preserving all officially promulgated dogmas and sacraments from any error or intrinsic evil (of course, this protection does not apply to non-traditional interpretations of Vatican II teachings or to mistranslations or abuses of the Novus Ordo Missae). Traditionalists must accept this simple truth, but they don’t. This makes them both schismatic and heretical. Nevertheless, the seeming novelty of some elements in Vatican II and the Novus Ordo did provide an occasion for the faithful to seem to make a choice for “Tradition” over this seeming novelty. Lovers of Tradition have thus been placed in the eminently non-traditional stance of having to choose what is not supposed to be chosen, but only received. Even if they choose rightly, dismissing the apparent novelty and adhering to the Tradition, they make such a choice with a consciousness of being “on their own,” seemingly in spite of the guidance and counsel of those who presently rule Holy Mother Church.

It is akin to the abused teenager who must choose whether to run away from home and live on his own or remain under the authority of his parents. There are adverse consequences for both choices, but the mere consideration of such a choice is deeply traumatic in itself. The false dichotomy with which Catholics appear to be faced is bound to cause psychological and spiritual disorders, even among the most good-willed and spiritually vigilant of Catholics. The idea of being forced by the authorities of the Church into a choice between remaining at home and suffering or running away and suffering is spiritually traumatic. Like in the case of the abused teenager, regardless of what choice is made, one feels “on one’s own” in the making of it, and such an attitude is antithetical to the kind of childlike trust Catholics should have toward their Mother. Of course, being treated with contempt by the Church’s hierarchy, as those Catholics devoted to the 1962 Mass have sometimes been treated by certain Churchmen, is an unconscionable evil. However, such evil can lead to other unseen, subtle evils that arise in response to it. An attitude of “I will never allow myself to be subject to that kind of treatment anymore!” can lead to heresy and schism as much as an attitude of cowardly resignation to such treatment, and not defending our Lord when He needs defending.

It is a consciousness of having to “choose” to be and subscribe to a certain type or quality of Catholicism, whether the “new” Catholicism of the Vatican II “spirit,” or the “old” Catholicism of pre-Council tradition. There is a certain inescapability to this choice-consciousness: Even if one’s choice is to remain with Tradition, which is the only good choice because the object of the choice is good, plain, and simple, eschewing any innovations and deviations, it is still an unnatural choice in a subjective sense, one that shouldn’t exist, and would not exist without the Church mysteriously having created the occasion for it. To me, this is the real smoke of Satan, because it gets you coming or going. It is ultimately a mystery, the Passion of the Church prophesied by mystics and described in the Catechism.

This is deeply traumatic to the soul, and its fallout manifests in different ways depending on the spiritual and dispositional particularities of each person. But it really is a “great façade,” because it is ultimately an illusion. There really is no choice whatsoever, nor can there be. Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and His Church is His body—neither can change. All there is is ordinary Catholicism. God-pleasing, ordinary Catholicism can exist within the milieu of the revised Roman Rite as well as the “Old Rite.” I say, “can” deliberately, for I mean it for both cases. Some Novus Ordo ecclesial milieus are spiritually bad, but it is not because the Novus Ordo Mass is “bad”; it can’t be because the Novus Ordo Mass is God-pleasing in itself, containing nothing heretical or evil. The Magisterium has told us so. It is, rather, because of abuses of the rite, misbehavior on the part of the priests and people, and acquiescence to the enormous temptation to desacralize, humanize, immanentize, and horizontalize the liturgy. Irreverence, blasphemy, sloth, worldliness: these are the spiritual poisons one imbibes in a milieu that embodies the choice for the “new.”

On the other hand, some Tridentine Mass ecclesial milieus can be just as spiritually dangerous. Of course, it is not because of the Tridentine Mass per se, but because of the hyper-consciousness of “being a Tridentine Mass Catholic,” a consciousness that is, I must say, unavoidable in such milieus now that the original and traumatic choice-consciousness has infected the entire Church. It is quite unnatural and debilitating to have to fight off this consciousness, and it can have a spiritually damaging effect, with the sins of schism and pride, and the vices of paranoia, judgment, harshness, lack of meekness, a spirit of criticism, Jansenism, and the like being the predominant spiritual fallout from habituation in this milieu embodying a “choice” for the old.

In sum, gnosticism is what underlies the traditionalist cult today. The core of gnosticism is believing and acting based solely on yourself as an authority, because you, not God, are good and holy and the source of truth, while pretending to others and to yourself that you are just obeying a higher authority, even the highest authority. Catholic traditionalism is just gnosticism larping as pious obedience. No traditionalist belief or practice is held or done because the Magisterium actually commands it. There is no magisterial command to attend only the Latin Mass, or to despise the Novus Ordo, or to have 4+ children no matter the circumstances, yet the traditionalists hold to these as if they were commanded by Christ. No, they are obeying only their inner circle cult of spiritual superiority.

Catholic Traditionalism is thus an ideology and a cult. Its reactionary, tendentious narrative and purely human, erroneous doctrines are unquestioned and treated as reality itself. It has its commissars and intellectuals. It pretends to be just faithful Catholicism in its pure form, but it is nothing of the sort. It is founded upon the satanic lie that the Magisterium can call good what is actually evil. The Magisterium has definitely and infallibly called Vatican II and the revised Roman Missal good, as well as NFP and the Divine Mercy devotion, but Trad Cultists insist these are evil. This is nothing less than blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the unforgivable sin. It is this sin that is at the heart of the traditionalist cult. Catholic traditionalism is an elitist, inner-circle, schismatic cult, a self-justifying, arbitrary, fake aristocracy. It is an ideology grounded in nothing more than arrogant complacency in spiritual superiority. It’s the product of neurotic, scrupulous, narcissistic, insecure souls—fueled by pride—and it is nothing else than neo-Phariseeism. Jesus harshly condemned it when He was on Earth, and He does so today from Heaven.

There is just the magisterium, pre- and post-1965; just the Church; just the dogmatic teachings pre- and post-1962; and just the approved liturgies. Preferences are permitted among what is optional, so preferring the TLM does not make one a trad cultist, and preferring the Novus Ordo does not make one a modernist heretic. But rejecting the magisterium after 1962, and refusing to be in communion with those who don’t, and rejecting the magisterium before 1962 and refusing to be in communion with those who don’t, does make one a heretic and schismatic and thus outside the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.

And it’s not just outright magisterial rejection that makes one a schismatic and a cultist. It’s also a suspicion of the magisterium and its official judgments and decisions. One will accept it only if it meets one’s approval. This is not a religious submission of intellect and will. And then there is the magisterium that both trads and progressives invent in their sick minds and subcultures. It’s a sin to go to the Novus Ordo. It’s a sin not to have four or more children. It’s a sin to treat your wife as an equal instead of as an inferior human being (Aquinas taught this, and he was embarrassingly wrong). It’s a sin for a mother to ever work for money and contribute to the household—okay, trad cultist Tim Gordon. It’s a sin to say the Divine Mercy chaplet—okay, trad cultist Stephen Kokx. Ad nauseum and infernum. For the progressivists, it’s a sin to condemn sodomy—ok sodomite James Martin.

Yes, trads, the “St. Typical” coastal suburban mainstream Novus Ordo parish liturgy and culture sometimes evinces irreverence, emasculating music, and hardly any sense of the supernatural, feeling less like a sacred ritual sacrifice than a celebration of the precious community, with hardly any talk of sin (unless it be wokish ones) and the possibility of damnation, with the “presider” acting like an entertainer. But your typical TLM-only parish can be quite gloomy, guilt-ridden, scrupulous, misogynistic, inner circle, cultish, reactionary, fear-based, coercive, schismatic, uncharitable, snobby, joyless, judgy, dour, and sad. “Traditional” priests can be quite cold, impersonal, neurotic, and arrogant, superior to you and needing to be treated that way, with confessions that are shaming and abusive, and homilies that are either shame and guilt-inducing or replete with scapegoating of “those Catholics” and cheerleading for the in-crowd.

Of course, there are parishes, priests, and lay people, both NO and TLM, that evince none of these ideological toxins, but they are, sadly, the exception. Catholic discourse and subcultures, both “left” and “right”, are becoming more and more ideological and cultish. A typical “trad” now means a neurotic and prideful ideological Pharisee who thinks having 4 or more children (which he makes sure to tell everyone every other day and in all his social media bios) and treating his wife like a a child-slave makes him superior and gives him a ticket to heaven, and who despises the Novus Ordo, St. John Paul II, and St. Faustina.

Jesus condemned and mocked both the Sadducees and the Pharisees, for they were man-made cults of hypocrisy and abuse. These represent the superficially opposing but deeply similar counterfeits of authentic magisterial Catholicism whose trademark is ideological idiocy: lgbtq advocacy and that hell is not eternal, on the one hand, and men are superior to women and the Novus Ordo is evil, on the other. The evil spirit in both is one of disobedience, pride, and elitist supremacy. Trads have a deep-seated problem with authority, which is a problem with the will, not the intellect. They are an inner circle cult as evil and fraudulent as modernism. The more they proof-text their positions, the deeper they entrench themselves in the cult. All cultists become cultists because they get something from being in the cult, a psychological or emotional or social or financial good, and they place the good they are getting above the ultimate good of truth. Until they recognize this, all dialectical engagement just trads just makes them more cultish. The problem is not logic or reason but the will. The madman, as Chesterton said, has lost everything except Logic. Trads will prooftext their way all the way to hell. Erudite (and not so erudite) ideologues use their redoubtable rhetorical skills and high IQs to manipulate their audience into thinking just as they do, not to help us realize the truth for ourselves. This is propaganda. They turn Catholicism into an ideology. None is more guilty of this than Peter Kwasniewski, the reigning cult leader of traditionalism. These toxic personal and online subcultures cloak and counterfeit Catholic Reality.

Here’s a prime example of trad ideology: fertility Calvinism. Trophy wives is an evil thing. But trophy number-of-children is even worse. Nothing wrong with having many children, if it is a decision made with full, non-manipulating and non-coercive consent of wife and husband, and based upon prudence. It’s not ok if the ideology behind the decision is “God demands that we have as many children as we can and as fast as possible!!” That’s neurotic and fanatical Pharisee trad ideology. Even worse if the motivation is to be part of the “cool club.” “Look at us, we have 4+ children!” (4 is the magic number). “We are part of the elect!”Do you think you are a better Catholic because you have more children than others? Do you look down on, say, a family of “only” 3 and think—“mid” Catholic? Do you cite your 4+ number of children in your bio as if it were a resume builder? Do you mention it at least once a day so people know you’re a real Catholic? “John Supercatholic is the father of 8.” Why do we need to know this? Why not just “John is a father and husband”? Father of three? Not so much. Never print that. That’s shameful in these circles. Best not to mention it. Many classical and robustly Catholic schools and colleges doing great work for God and neighbor, are, nevertheless, notorious for having faculty bios that always culminate in the 4+ number of children brag. Chesterton Academies comes to mind. Number of children is used as a resume builder. If it’s less than four, and they mention the number, it’s only if the couple is very young—then it’s tolerable. X tweet: “Man, tough flu this season, all six of my children got it.” Not “All of my children got it”—never that if you’ve got more than three. You’ll notice that Catholics in these circles or who aspire to be in them with “only” three children hardly ever announce their number because of shame. It shows that you’re secular and selfish at best, and you used NFP! You just don’t trust in Providence.

“Good afternoon candidate. You’re here to interview for the editor position of Trad Magazine. I have some questions for you. I’ll ask the most important one first: How many children do you have?”

“Gee, well, three. But I’m a good Catholic and I know my stuff and I’m published and….”

“Really? you’re 40 years old and you should at least have four children by now—three is just not gonna cut it. We have competition you know. The editor of John Paul II the Heretic has 10 children and he’s only 30. Now that’s a Catholic. Next!”

Seldom discussed, however, is the dysfunction of many of these Catholic families, with neglected and abused children, many of whom act out later in life and lose the faith or become pathologically neurotic, and then there are the tortured, mentally ill mothers. But the externals look so holy! What happens when the children at some point become aware that they were valued more as trophies or resume builders than children, or as tokens of a neurotic Calvinist compulsion to insist that one is of the elect or better than “those Catholics.” And you can’t challenge them on this. They hate you for exposing their cult, and they think you’re just jealous because you’re not in the fertility elite. It is precisely the Phariseeism that enraged Our Lord. It’s a bizarre Catholic Calvinism substituting fertility for worldly prosperity. Good for you for having a large family, if that’s indeed what God wanted for you and your wife. But knowing many dysfunctional large Catholic families with abused wives and neglected, thoroughly neurotic children, perhaps some NFP was in God’s plan. “But no, NFP is Vatican II! And I wouldn’t get to be in the elite 4+ children club!

What was the Pharisees’ paradigm? Whatever it was, it made them desire to destroy Jesus and persecute His followers. They were the God-appointed leaders of the Jews! Their paradigm was the very Revelation of God, and they were the epitome of loyalty, piety, courage, and devotion to God! Well, yes, it was, and they were—if Jesus was only a human being. If he were God, however, then their virtues were vices, and the “Jews,” as St. John calls those Hebrews who rejected Jesus, became, not God’s Bride, but the devil’s prostitute, not the Church of Yahweh, but the “synagogue of Satan.” Saul was a prisoner to such a paradigm, and nothing but an unforeseen and violent encounter with who, to his diseased spirit and intellect, was the radically other, a Jewish man claiming to be God, could liberate him. If Saul had been allowed to remain in the isolated, blinded paradigm of the “Jewishdom” of his day, the way in which “traditional Catholics” would like to remain in the isolating “Christendoms” of their neuroses, fears, and gnostic certainties, his blindness would never have been revealed to him, and he would never have become St. Paul, the apostle to the Jewish other, the Gentile. Christ Himself had to break Saul out of his idolatrous paradigm, which was indeed not one of authentic Mosaic Judaism but a rabbinical, proto-Talmudic fanaticism of purely human origin. This had to occur violently against his will, but we have the chance to invite Christ freely into our minds, by inviting the salvific “others”—ones that we would rather not meet— into our intimacy as they are providentially “forced” upon us by Our Lord in our modern pluralistic world—as neighbors. Anything else is fear of contamination, otherwise known as schism, the ecclesial sin against charity.

As the Antichrist approaches, prepared for by the apotheosis of his worldly minions, of which we have had a foretaste in the totalitarian plandemic, on pause for now, but about to replay at a much higher speed and volume, he will rule over and exploit and annihilate all our paltry paradigms. We will all be in the position of the Apostles when the Truth Incarnate asks each of us personally, “Who do you say that I am?” At that moment, no paradigm will do, no proof-texting will suffice, and no tribal in-house ideology will help you. Let us all prepare ourselves now for that moment by destroying our idols and relativizing our paradigms, with the knowledge that when it all comes down, we are all personally responsible for recognizing, loving, and obeying Truth, and although we are tradition-constituted rational animals who can only make rational judgments within and by the help of inherited and chosen paradigms of thought, we are required and enabled ultimately to transcend these paradigms by God Himself, who wants to know whom we really love at the core of our hearts, a place beyond any paradigm, where God meets us intimately and immediately. Let us prepare for the meeting, for it is coming soon.

—Alasdair MacIntyre

The inner willingness which is not closed against even the most unpleasant truth, which is really free from bias, ready to make friends with things, open to the proof of all objective existence, not looking at things through a colored lens that allows only such things to pass into the understanding as do not offend our pride and self-complacency

—Dietrich von Hildebrand

Luisa Picarretta, who died in 1947, is a Servant of God, declared by the Church in 2005. Saint Padre Pio knew her. He would say to the people of Corato who went to San Giovanni Rotondo: “What have you come here for? You have Luisa, go to her.” At around the age of fourteen, Luisa began to experience visions and apparitions of Jesus and Mary along with physical suffering. On one occasion, Jesus placed the crown of thorns upon her head causing her to lose consciousness and the ability to eat for two or three days. That developed into the mystical phenomenon whereby Luisa began to live on the Eucharist alone as her “daily bread.” Whenever she was forced under obedience by her confessor to eat, she was never able to digest the food, which came out minutes later, intact and fresh, as if it had never been eaten. She lived for decades on the Eucharist alone. Her 36 volumes of writings, dictated to her by Jesus Christ Himself, have been approved by the Church, with no fewer than 19 nihil obstats from a canonized saint, St. Hannibal di Francia. Her teachings are meant for our times, these last times: the necessity of absolute obedience to God’s will even to the level of “Living in the Divine Will.” Through Luisa, Jesus tells us that God has enabled this new level of holiness by opening the floodgates of Grace at a level of abundance and intensity unknown in the whole history of the Church.

Father James Mawdsley is a self-styled traditionalist Catholic priest who writes and speaks about the evils of Zionism and the urgency of the conversion of the Jews, both for the renewal of the Church from its apostasy and the rescuing of the world from, as he says, hell on earth. He defied the plandemic lies and was punished for doing so by his own “traditionally Catholic” religious order. This is a priest who recognizes the evil of the modernism that has taken over the Vatican and seduced most of the Bishops of the Catholic Church, and the beauty of the Latin Mass. This is also a priest who has recorded video ls in which he insists—with absolute certainty in a tone of hateful scorn—that Luisa’s writings are “a scream from hell.” These days he is now accusing them of being “Talmudic.”

The law of excluded middle requires us to choose between these two antithetical judgments. Both can’t be right. One of these Catholics is promoting evil as good; Fr. Mawdsley thinks Luisa and her followers are doing this. One is promoting good as evil; those who love Luisa think that Fr. Mawdsley is doing this. If Luisa is right, then Fr. Mawdsley and his followers are sinning against the Holy Spirit, the sin of calling what is supernaturally good diabolically evil, the sin that the Pharisees committed when they deemed Jesus, the Good Incarnate, to be evil. If Fr. Mawdsley is right, then Luisa and her devotees are calling what is diabolically evil supernaturally good, which is also the sin against the Holy Spirit. It is “the unforgivable sin”:

Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. (Matt. 12:31–32)

If a sin can be called unforgivable, it must be a sin the essential character of which is to preclude repentance. What sin could do this? What sin could make one absolutely unwilling to repent, completely unwilling to admit one is wrong? “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1. John 1:8). But what could possibly cause someone to make this sort of judgment about oneself?

Fr. Mawdsley says, and repeats it often in his videos, that he is certain that Luisa’s teachings are diabolical. He is certain that they are evil. I have provided him with an abundance of reasons, including authoritative declarations from the Church’s Magisterium, why his interpretations are, at best, debatable, and, at worst, plainly wrong. But he has only doubled down on his condemnations as if all these explanations and interpretations didn’t exist, or just not even worthy of his attention. Nowhere in his videos does he state or give any impression that he is open to the possibility that he is mistaken. No, he is certain, as certain as he could possibly be, as if he were dealing with a defined dogma of the Catholic Faith about which there is and can be no doubt. For Fr. Mawdsley, the evil of Luisa’s writings is plain and indubitable, and it is not accidental—it’s a scream from hell—on the same level as the evil of the satanic bible or the communist manifesto or the doctrines of Freemasonry and the Jewish Kabbalah—but much worse because the main speaker in Luisa’ writings is purported to be Jesus Christ Himself.

One would think that the Catholic orthodoxy of a given set of spiritual writings, let alone whether they are dictated by Satan, shouldn’t have to be determined for and all by oneself. Isn’t that what the Church is for? Well, yes. The Church has officially approved Luisa’s writings. She has declared her to be a Servant of God, not to mention that those volumes attacked by Mawdsley were already approved by Saint Hannibal di Francia (and his archbishop). As O’Connor remarks, “Who is more worthy of trust on this matter: a priest who was appointed by the Church to be Luisa’s spiritual director, knew her well, heard her confessions, read (& approved) her volumes in their own original language, was appointed to be her censor librorum… and was later canonized as a saint! ….. or, on the other hand, some priest a hundred years later, who has clearly read only a minuscule portion of Luisa’s writings, (and only a translation at that), and who has no mandate from the Church to render a judgment here?” So why is Fr. Mawdsely not deferring to the Church’s authority here?

The answer, I think, resides in when Luisa was declared a Servant of God, 1994. That year comes after the Second Vatican Council, in case you didn’t know. According to traditionalist Catholicism, one shouldn’t trust any Churchman, Church decision, or Church teaching after 1962 (or is it 1958?) In the words of a former traditionalist colleague of mine, Theo Howard: “I don't trust or follow anything after the Second Vatican Council and all my research has led me to conclude that all the post-conciliar popes were, to a greater or lesser degree, traitors to the Catholic Faith, not least for refusing to safeguard the Deposit of Faith and take action against the blatant heresies of numerous bishops and priests that consumed so many of the faithful and wrought such destruction to the Holy Catholic Church.” So there you have it. It means nothing that the Church declared Luisa a Servant of God because, well, it wasn’t really the Church that did so. If she had been declared such in, say, 1950, that would be a different story. Oh, and the same goes for St. Faustina (we know all about John Paul II’s Polish bias) and the Divine Mercy, which is obviously just the Vatican II counterchurch’s counterfeit of the Sacred Heart. God is a God of judgment! Stay away from the Divine Mercy—it’s from the Devil! This is all indicative of schismatic thinking, and Fr Mawdsley is a schismatic. That is ultimately the reason he hates Luisa. “Those Novus Ordo fake Catholics and evil popes love her. She must then be a fraud just as the Novus Ordo and Vatican II are frauds.”

It’s insane and against the sensus Catholicus to think, and not only to think, but “know with certainty” that a Servant of God whose life was monitored almost minute by minute by priests and confessors and saints, and whose writings were read carefully and approved and celebrated by a Saint, Annibale Di Francia, actually spent her life listening to the words of Satan and believing them to be the words of Jesus. Now add all the attested miracles associated with her life and all the other more than credible witnesses of her holiness and orthodoxy. It’s absolutely insane. Mawdsley has chosen to lock himself in a paradigm that is schismatic, namely, that the Church after 1958 or whenever is not to be trusted. It is no longer an authority.

Daniel O’Connor:

Who was this "someone" who had access to Luisa in order to engage in decades-long "Satanic abuse," and somehow go undetected by dozens of different priest-theologian-spiritual directors, all appointed by the Archbishop, over a period of 40+ years of revelations, and who scrutinized every detail of her life & writings and said Mass in her room every single day? Every single one of these experts---who knew Luisa intimately, and who were appointed by the Church to the task of directing and assessing her-and scrutinizing every minute detail of her experiences--became absolutely convinced of the supernatural origin of her mysticism and revelations. One of them is now a canonized saint who dedicated his life to promoting Luisa's writings. Yet you now publicly claim you are "sure" that these dozens of qualified (and pre-Vatican II, might I add) priests who actually knew Luisa were, the whole 40+ years, were --- EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM-- completely under the spell of a Satanic delusion (and that this Satanic delusion was later confirmed by Luisa's cause for canonization opening). And, somehow, not a single one of these priest-directors who knew Luisa got a single whiff of the reality that you, and you alone, the Great Mawdsley, have discovered by sampling a few passages. This is really a degree of hubris for the record books.

Here is the only truly Satanic thing here; one of the most Luciferean acts of arrogance and pride (his favorite vices, of course) I have ever seen a priest commit. For you to swoop onto the scene, 100 years later, read a few passages from a translation of Luisa's diary, and decide that you are the only non-deceived one; you alone realize this is all "Satanic abuse," whereas everyone the Church commissioned to the task (and who actually knew Luisa) came to the opposite conclusion. You have completely lost your mind and your soul, Fr. Mawdsley. You cannot hide behind your pathetic excuse any longer; we all see right through it. You can't exonerate yourself by pretending "I'm not saying Luisa was complicit, I"m just saying her writings are Satanic." Luisa believed in these revelations more than in herself. Condemning them as "Satanic" is far worse than condemning her directly.

Most of Luisa's critics are modernist heretics like Cardinal Semeraro and the Korean Bishops who think that Luisa's theology is "too rigid." Yet even these wolves in sheep's clothing at least lack the diabolical evil that you have. At least they are merely expressing (ridiculous) "concerns." But you're way past that; infinitely past that. You are not merely being a cowardly Peter or a betraying Judas here. You are being an affirmatively evil Caiphas. For you are announcing that the works of God are Satanic, and you are insisting you are "sure" about this charge. And in due time -- unless you repent (and do so publicly) -- your own words will condemn you.

How can I criticize Fr. Mawdsley if I share his condemnation of the modernism that has seeped into the Church and is now seemingly dominant? Why don’t I also share his condemnation of the writings of Luisa Picarretta, or at least exhibit some suspicion of them, since on their face they seem “non-traditional” and to teach things irreconcilable with the traditional theological and mystical teachings of the Saints, you know, the ones traditionalists trust, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross? The answer is that Luisa is holy, and her teachings are holy. Period. Anyone who doesn’t see this is either bad-willed, malformed, or just a low-level spiritual intellect. And I know this not only because the post-Vatican II Church has told me and I trust her in this case (and yes, the Church is not infallible in this area), but because her orthodoxy and holiness and that of her writings are manifest and irrefutable. But why doesn’t Fr. Mawdsley agree with me? But not only does he not agree with me, he also has the complete opposite view. He doesn’t just have some concerns due to what seem to be unorthodox teachings and morally unsuitable language, concerns about which he is open to discussing to see if they are justified. No, he is in outright condemnation of her writings as diabolical—along with the implied judgment that she was not at all holy—after all, how could a holy person think that Jesus Christ is the author of doctrines so clearly from Satan? Low spiritual IQ people don’t get to be Servants of God.

Here is what Fr Mawdsley doesn’t want you to read. It’s an irrefutable defense of those passages that Mawdsley deems “demonic” and “sexual.” These were put up as comments on his videos, and never once did Mawdsley respond to them. I wonder why:

I am learning a lot thinking this through. But I cannot be convinced. The main difficulty is that Father and the persons posting comments below reflexively assign sexual intentions and feelings to certain physical signs of affection. A kiss on the mouth is not automatically sexual in large parts of the world, nor I submit can it be taken to be so in Luisa's writings.

We are looking at three blessed innocents and interpreting their actions through the lens of disordered and sexualized passions. Suckling at the breasts is a sign of the suckler's weakness and absolute dependence upon the nursing mother. God the Son willed to place himself into this position. Luisa, it is obvious after reading merely ten pages let alone 4000, was foreign to all sexual longing. There are such persons of course, despite Freud's attempt to defile everything. One doubts she ever committed mortal sin at least after she undertook her mystical vocation.

When demons are involved normally sexual organs come into play. The female breasts are not a sexual organ, but organs of nourishment. One may treat the heart as a percussive instrument, but that is not what it is.

Luisa is also a unique figure in the history of Catholic mysticism, at least by the internal measure of her diaries, the first of 'common stock' to possess the Divine Will in a distinctive way. Much more need be said on this point. But one must allow her a specific mode of an imitatio Christi. Too much to say! Taking a handful of passages that are saturated with mystical symbolism out of the surrounding theological context and then delivering them with a somewhat growling tone and strongly condemnatory language is maximally far from a sufficient method for grasping a text's meaning. The result merely stirs up the passions and incites precipitate action while making understanding impossible. This method is the go to for those trying to scare people off the Bible. Anyway, the point is moot, as the writings have the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur (well prior to V II) and two positive affirmations (after V II). Holy Mother Church has declared repeatedly over the course of nearly one hundred years that the texts are consistent with faith and morals. Who precisely are we to contradict her on this point? If one reads the actual text it prescribes the severest species of Catholic spiritual discipline continuous with the whole tradition of total surrender of self to Christ. It takes up and intensifies Aquinas' position that more than anything else God wants each of us to sacrifice his particular will to Him. The diaries think the matter through to its bitter end, which approximated to, becomes the sweetest interior joy and peace, even when accompanied by intense pains - nay, because the advanced mystic shares in Christ's joy in doing reparation for others.

The matter requires sustained public discussion by competent Catholic theologians. Since my response will be largely intelligible without the reply I was responding to I submit to your attention and that of your viewers.) We are a bit handicapped due to the format, but there is nothing but to plough ahead. I believe that the appropriate term to use in association with "inappropriate" and "irreverent" is "offensive." Those first two terms do not sit well with "repulsive." I take it that you have not intended the term in its narrow physical sense, but in its moral and affective senses. So, I cannot receive the phrase 'repulsive in their irreverence' while being able to empathize with the person communicating it. "Offensive in their irreverence" is another story. I at least get what is being conveyed by means of that second phrase and could proceed to evaluate a claim incorporating it.

The use of the word "repulsive" is appropriate in relation to certain sinful expressions of human sexuality. This is why I originally cast the issue, significantly but not exclusively, in terms of sexuality.

You go on to refer a 'light of sexual impropriety' cast by putative sado-masochistic passages. So, you admit that the issue is in fact about sexuality, reversing your initial claim that "that is not the point at all." This adequately explains your use of the word 'repulsive.' So, I now regard that matter as settled. Nonetheless, you have helpfully focused the issue on the putative sado-masochistic passages. This issue brings in the very large issue of the place of suffering in the Divine Plan. It specifically brings in the issues of the sufferings of the saints, martyrs, confessors, ordinary Christians, non-Christians, and even of animals. As a theologian you immediately see that there is not space in a YT comment section to handle this large issue adequately. For the benefit of those reading this, I will nonetheless comment briefly below.

You write: "The spiritual truths being communicated in mysticism depend upon the symbols used to communicate them . . ." No one can dispute this. I have claimed the same, but have added a second conjunct, which you without justification omit: these spiritual truths just as much depend upon the words that accompany and clarify the meanings of the symbols. It is the interaction between the words and the symbols that matters. Luisa's diaries provide much more material than one could need to explain the passages you refer to. Let me take arguably the most controversial remaining passage, the squeezing of the heart. The whole drama of Luisa’s life departs from her having voluntarily offered herself as a victim soul doing reparation for the sins of others. Thus, she voluntarily put herself in the place of sinners as a substitute who willingly absorbed the punishments, namely the pains, they had merited through their free rebellion against God. This has at least two effects that one can make out in the diaries. First, it reduced the severity of the chastisements human beings had come to merit. Second, she won through her meritorious suffering, in imitation of Christ’s and St. Mary’s own, graces of conversion and repentance for sinners. Jesus is Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Mercy. He is also Justice Itself. Thus, in accordance with His own essential nature as Justice He regarded Luisa in her assumed and accepted role as substitutionary victim soul under the aspect of the sins of others, on account of which sins she suffered. This explains the fierceness of His aspect. It was directed towards the sins she had so to speak identified with.

There are many ways in which a person may be caused to suffer. The stigmata are a particularly horrible way and unspeakably painful (by report). Having one’s heart squeezed is a second, not obviously any more horrible than receiving the stigmata. In fact, it is probably less. But put subjective reactions and estimations to one side. If one regards the Lord giving St. Francis, St. Catherine, and St. Pio the stigmata as something holy and not sadistic, then it is arbitrary to hold that the mere squeezing of a heart is sadistic. On the contrary, the underlying logic is that Luisa was participating in God’s Glory, namely, His suffering whereby in part He conquered sin and death (spiritual and biological). [Our Lord did not merely suffer, but of course died as well.] [This reasoning will, if all goes well, continue in a further reply.]

There is a judgment of inappropriateness and I agree that it would be not merely inappropriate but sacrilegious in, say, my relating to Jesus or St. Mary in any kind of intimate way appropriate, say, to members of a family. This is true despite a Christian being an adopted child of the Father. That is the point. I am gravely damaged by past sins in a way that Luisa was not. To be more precise, there is no evidence she was – and evidence abounds in the form of decades of diary entries, the reports of those who knew her, and even the testimony of St. Pio – so there is no reason to believe that she was gravely damaged by mortal sin.

You cite the passage where she is tempted to give birth to the spawn of a demon. This is a disturbing passage and clearly meant to be such. All interactions with demons are interactions with evil beings who are, indeed, morally repulsive. They are disturbing. The important point is that she resists the temptation. It is a puzzling passage that underlines her membership in the group of those affected by original sin. By itself it does not overthrow the whole doctrine communicated in the diaries nor prove that she was undergoing decades long demonic obsession. Father, many persons have had odd encounters with demons. They prayed and the matter ended there. I helped one family seemingly rid their house of at least demonic manifestations, if not the demons themselves, simply by praying a complete Rosary with the mother.

It is manifestly clear from numerous passages in the diaries that Jesus – or the being posing as Jesus if one follows your interpretation – is singling Luisa out from the very group of those who belong to the set of those affected by original sin. He goes on at length explaining that this is how He normally proceeds, by selecting one person - Abraham, St. Mary, St. Francis, etc., - for a definite purpose in salvation history and then building on and developing from this foundation. From Abraham, we gained at first ‘natural’ Israel and later, Abraham’s seed, Jesus Himself; St. Mary of course gave birth to Jesus and thus through Him to the entire Church; St. Francis of course founded a whole order; and Luisa is the first individual to have received the gift of the Divine Will, on September 8th of 1889. Some followers of Luisa argue that St. Thérèse, St. Faustina, and St. Pio also received this gift. St. Hannibal definitely asked for it. One could propose further candidates. I take no position on this question, other than that it would have made excellent sense for the Lord to expand what He had begun.

This adequately explains why Luisa was raised to a particular station of intimacy. This intimacy was bespoken and acted on as recorded in hundreds of passages in the diaries. You have objected to kissing the Holy Face of Jesus. You would be on very solid ground if ever I, a wretched sinner, proposed to kiss the Holy Face. You yourself clearly would never do it. But neither of us is a bed-ridden virgin with a first-grade education who has voluntary taken on utterable pains for the material and spiritual benefit of millions of persons whom we have never met. @ScriptureandTraditionFrJM

It should be added that you and I do presume to place our Lord, or have our Lord placed, on the tonque and then to masticate the wafer concealing His real presence and then even to swallow Him and mix Him with our appalling digestive juices. We are commanded to do this because our Lord desires this type of intimacy with His creatures. He is entirely free to ask for and engage in other types of innocent intimacy with other of His creatures. You seem to claim that the Holy Bible contains no passage that can suggest taking any sexually inappropriate action. This is an extremely strong claim – so strong in fact that I am afraid you may come to regret having offered it.

Some persons can easily misunderstand the following: “And a certain young man followed him, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and they laid hold of him. 52 But he, casting off the linen cloth, fled from them naked.” (Mark 14: 51, DR)

Misunderstanding is beyond a mere possibility. Crowleyan Satanists see a homosexual ritual in this passage. We can be assured on the basis of faith that there is no such ritual here. One may read the symbolism in a manner that brings out something about the Faith, just as I read the symbolism in Luisa’s diaries to bring out its teaching (which is put forward as in effect following logically from what is already present in the deposit of faith. That is a big claim that would require lengthy justification. The only thing to do is to submit the question to exact scrutiny and follow wherever evidence, logic, and faith lead).

You claimed that all suggestions of impropriety are absent even from the Old Testament. As a counter-example take Numbers 3:7: “They warred with the Midianites . . . they killed all the men . . . [Moses said] “have you left alive all the women even those who tempted the Israelites to transgress the Law? Therefore, kill every male among the little ones and every woman who has known a man intimately and keep for yourselves the young girls who have not known a man intimately.” Enemies of God can read this as referring to an exhortation to engage in pedophilia. Whereas the adult women had committed adultery with some of the Israelites, the girls are all virgins, so one cannot transgress the Law in having intercourse with them. This is how a Dawkins or Hitchens might read this passage.

Consider this passage from Proverbs [5:18-19, DR]: “Let thy vein be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth: [19] Let her be thy dearest hind, and most agreeable fawn: let her breasts inebriate thee at all times; be thou delighted continually with her love.” Many persons will misunderstand the exhortation concerning how a husband should regard his wife’s breasts. While they are here proposed as ornaments filling out her beauty, many persons will read this passage erotically.

Protestants have used the following passage to conclude something one ought never to think at all about the Holy Virgin: “And he knew her not till she brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.” (Mt. 1:25, DR) The sense they assign to this passage is plain, but Douay Rheims cites St. Jerome explaining that the Greek term for until (eōs) translates a Hebrew term that in fact refers to a period up to and beyond a certain point in time. “The Lord said to my Lord: Sit thou at my right hand: Until I make thy enemies thy footstool.” (Ps. 109:1, DR) Jesus will not retire from His position at the right hand of the Father after total victory.

You did not respond to the observation that the [first nineteen volumes of the] diaries have already received the nihil obstat and the imprimatur and that all thirty-six volumes have received positive judgments from theologians in the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints. Mother Gabrielle Marie claims that she was told that one of these theologians was then Cardinal Ratzinger.

You find suggestions of sexual impropriety and sadomasochism in Luisa’s diaries. You also claim that they are inspired by the Devil. You further claim that there is a ripe possibility someone will use them to justify founding – let’s just say it – a sex cult. You must look at the actual persons who are leading the Divine Will movement and ask whether you really believe that any of these persons are aiming at, or susceptible to, founding a sex cult. I find it, frankly, impossible to take seriously. If I follow you, your advice to the lay faithful is not to read the diaries, else they may open themselves to demonic obsession and the demons, having gained entry, can then do them great harm. This might involve, again, entering, by stages perhaps, into a sex cult, but will at minimum involve adopting heretical positions which, once subscribed to will constitute mortal sin and lead one to damnation. You overlook, again, that the lay faithful have been cleared here by Holy Mother Church, which has declared the diaries to be wholly consistent with faith and morals. Many priests and nuns have sadly been guilty of sexual impropriety over the history of the Church. The advice to give the faithful is, clearly, whether a person with a religious vocation practices the Divine Will devotion or does not practice the devotion, to report clear cases of sexual impropriety by priests, deacons, and religious to their local bishop. Thank you for reading this and for your service to and love for our Lord, our Lady, and Holy Mother Church. I am particularly appreciative of your treatment of Zionism, Israel, and Christian Zionism.

Why isn’t Father Mawdsley like me, suspicious of some post-Vatican II official judgments of holiness—St. Paul VI?—while also seeing the obvious holiness of Luisa’s life and writings? The answer is that he is a schismatic. I suspect that this has a lot to do with a perverse desire overruling his reason, perhaps the desire for a secure and infallible paradigm of thought and judgment, impervious to any error, ambiguity, or doubt. I’d like to have that! Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting such a paradigm, and Catholics actually have this in the infallible Magisterium, when it comes to Catholic dogma. And such a paradigm is desirable now more than ever before due to the post-Vatican II confusion of which both Fr. Mawdsely and I are very aware. But it is the desire for an absolute paradigm of truth, over a desire for absolute truth itself, that is the main problem, and it is this that will make one a sitting duck for the Antichrist, against which no intellectual paradigm will offer any defense, and whose arrival is most probably very imminent.

What was the Pharisees’ paradigm? Whatever it was, it made them desire to destroy Jesus and persecute His followers. They were the God-appointed leaders of the Jews! Their paradigm was the very Revelation of God, and they were the epitome of loyalty, piety, courage, and devotion to God! Well, yes, it was and they were—if Jesus was only a human being. If he was God, however, then their virtues become vices, and the “Jews,” as St. John calls those Hebrews who rejected Jesus, become, not God’s Bride, but the devil’s prostitute, not the Church of Yahweh, but the “synagogue of Satan.” Saul was a prisoner to such a paradigm, and nothing but an unforeseen, undesired-indeed, violent encounter with who, to his diseased spirit and intellect, was the radically other, a Jewish man claiming to be God, could liberate him. If Saul had been allowed to remain in the isolated, blinded paradigm of the “Jewishdom” of his day, the way in which some traditional Catholics, such as Fr. Mawdsley, would like to remain in the isolating “Christendoms” of their neuroses, fears, and gnostic certainties, his blindness would never have been revealed to him, and he would never have become St. Paul, the apostle to the Jewish other, the Gentile. Christ Himself had to break Saul out of his idolatrous paradigm, which was indeed not one of authentic Mosaic Judaism but a rabbinical, proto-Talmudic fanaticism of purely human origin. This had to occur violently against his will, but we have the chance to invite Christ freely into our minds, by inviting the salvific “others”—ones that we would rather not meet— into our intimacy as they are providentially “forced” upon us by Our Lord in our modern pluralistic world—as neighbors, or as bedridden, illiterate, nineteenth-century nobodys through which Jesus has given the world the greatest grace since the Incarnation, the grace of Living in the Divine Will.

We need this gift, because as the Antichrist approaches, prepared for by the apotheosis of his Great Reset worldly minions of which we have had a foretaste in the totalitarian plandemic, on pause for now by about to replay at a much higher speed and volume, he will rule over and exploit and annihilate all our paltry paradigms. We will all be in the position of the Apostles when the Truth Incarnate asked them each personally: “Who do you say that I am?” At that moment, no paradigm will do, no proof-texting will suffice, and no tribal in-house ideology will help you. Let us all prepare ourselves now for that moment by destroying our idols and relativizing our paradigms, with the knowledge that when it all comes down, we are all personally responsible for recognizing, loving, and obeying Truth, and although we are tradition-constituted rational animals who can only make rational judgments within and by the help of inherited and chosen paradigms of thought, we are required and enabled ultimately to transcend these paradigms by God Himself, who wants to know whom we really love at the core of our hearts, a place beyond any paradigm, where God meets us intimately and immediately. Let us prepare for the meeting, for it is coming soon.