So it happened.  Russia was consecrated to Mary’s Immaculate Heart.  The Holy Father led the necessary prayer on March 25th with all the bishops of the world invited to join in.  Now what?

It was fascinating to see the interest grow over the Consecration and the Fatima promises over the last three weeks.  Not only did many Catholics follow the event, but many secular parties took note as well.  Hey, this is one of those times that the Catholic Church got some unexpected positive publicity while demonstrating its enduring relevance on the world stage on what would otherwise be another random Friday.  We’ll take it!

For Catholics, many poured a hefty amount of attention into the whole experience.  A lot of Catholics even spent hours online debating the efficacy of the consecration.  Some debated whether it could be valid based upon what words were used, whether Pope Francis is really the pope, whether Pope Benedict XVI’s participation as Pope Emeritus would make it count, etc…

This is not to downplay the significance of the event or to categorize everyone who took interest as a gawker of the social media and podcast spectacle that emerged (the side thing about the thing).  But it is important to sort out the real relevance of the consecration when we consider the totality of the state of the world and the magnitude of what will be required to combat the evil the world is up against that go beyond a physical war between two countries in Eastern Europe.  

The day before the consecration, I was made uneasy by a single social media post that literally said, “I am so excited about tomorrow.  Maybe the world really will start changing now!”  In a recent newsletter by Michael Hichborn, he said the following in lieu of the build up to the consecration and the many questions surrounding it:

      Our Lady didn’t JUST ask for the consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart by 
      the pope in union with all the bishops of the world.  She also requested that everyone   
      stop sinning and offending Our Lord, that we pray the Rosary daily for the Pope and
      for peace, and that we make the five First Saturdays of reparation to Her Immaculate
      Heart.

As powerful as prayer is and as efficacious are the prayers of the Supreme Pontiff and bishops throughout the world, men throughout the world remained with their free will intact on March 26th.  Men such as Putin, Zelensky, Schwab, Soros, Xi, Biden, Gates, and all the rest of the same elite over world who are hell bent on either killing their way to a piece of the world or to conquer the whole thing in a grand New World Order remain.  They still have evil hearts and are in position to exercise their habits of committing grave offenses against the dignity of the human person on a mass scale.  

How efficacious is a consecration if the world is still a broken and chaotic battleground where violating the innocent while using billions of dollars to market the appearance of benevolence is rewarded and those who are violated seem more and more programmed to love it?  Man still has the free will to either be one those who pushes the world over the edge or stands by and watches. 

Or, of course, to be heroic in resistance to it.

The Consecration intrigued me too.  But other than being thankful for it and also praying for the end of the violence in Ukraine, it seems like my obligation and everyone else’s obligation was and ultimately remains to be good, resist sin, and practice the faith diligently.  And thus March 26th came.  


The Faith is the Answer

How does the Church still receive such grand positive publicity on a global scale, and catch the attention of media sources outside of the Catholic Church with such force as she still does today?  Amid all the scandal (waves of it for 2000 years now), and through the regime changes of world governments time and time over, world wars, and the solidification of our ever dehumanizing Modern Age, how does the Church still stand as a notable and world-wide relevant institution in this strange newly emerging Post-Modern world?

Easy, because the Faith has always been the answer to the world’s problems.   Not necessarily “faith” itself, but The Faith is the answer.  The Catholic Faith that stands firm in contrast to the whims of the rest of the world, that has always preached that the ills of the world will be solved by eliminating sin and through humble subjection to the authority of God through reparation, obedience, and prayer,. The Faith that recognizes and protects the dignity of man as the image of God (intellect and free choice of the will) on earth with certain rights and goods that must be respected always, and The Faith that knows that this world is not eternal, but is merely our ship to man’s ultimate destination, the beatific vision and perfect union with the author of this world and all in it, God.

Let’s be even more clear about the Faith.  As to avoid equivocation, it is wise to distinguish this Faith from other understandings of “faith”.  Faith  can be understood as a theological virtue, which one obviously must have in order to practice the Faith.    That is all well and good and granted.  But very generally speaking, one can speak of faith as a particular creed (set of beliefs).  One could even speak of faith as a creed intrinsically connected to a corresponding cult (group who share a creed in common).  

Secular authors are oftentimes willing to use  the word “faith” to indicate a belief in something that they cannot totally prove by empirical evidence alone, but they still are convinced that they have sufficient reason to take their intellectual “leap” (of faith) to believe it anyway.  Ironically, most who use the word faith in this way usually to assert a belief in a system of governance, an ethics code, or an over arching destination of the world that they believe must be advanced.  Amazing how the open mind closes on something.  It’s easy to see how much “faith” an Atheist must have be in order to actively believe against God and insist that the rest of the world ought to operate as if they also reject God.  How much has Communism proven what a terrifying credo and an even more terrifying cult that Atheism can be?  


Answer to what?

In my last article, I proposed that The Faith is the antithesis to Communism.  After recently asking a large group of brothers in arms how they liked living under Communist rule, there ensued a brief debate on what kind of oppression we were currently living under.  Many are not ready to acknowledge the current state as Communist, but are willing to acknowledge that we are well within the clutches of an elitist cabal of globalist overlords.  To which I ask, what is the real difference?

Personally, I use the term “Communism” to loosely refer to exactly that, a totalitarian state whereby human rights are thoroughly violated, (Abortion anyone?  2020?  Do you think bank accounts won’t be frozen here?) elections are farces, press secretaries lie with impunity, the highest ranking state officials are puppets, and the population is ultimately controlled by an elitist class who suck up all the money and power from a population that they believe they can change by their very human nature.  

Think of the testimony of Yuri Bezmenov, ex-KGB agent who defected and tried to warn America in the 80’s about the deliberate subversion of America’s youth in order to turn the United States Communist by programming and dumbing down a generation.  When I think about the youth I teach today, who regularly act offended when being challenged to think, or cannot focus past the length of a tic tok video, I think of the generation Yuri Bezmenov warned about.  Bezmenov said that once that generation was taken over, the need to feed America all the “junk food” won’t even exist anymore,  He concluded by saying that even when America is on the brink and ripe for the taking, the average man still won’t acknowledge it until “the military boot crushes his balls”.  

Think of Gary Allen, who in the 70’s was warning about the networking done by Kissinger between Capitalist West and Communist East during the Nixon administration.  Like many others of his genre, he warned about the central bankers investing in both sides of the Cold War, the United States trading with Russia the same materials they would use to make their weapons, and the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR?  Similar to the way many notice today that the WEF and the UN are a collection of elitists inching the world closer to a sustainable world without borders, Allen noticed something similar.  It’s a short read, go for it.

Think Stalin’s declaration that “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything”.  Perhaps the biggest blow of 2020 was the normalization of “mail in ballots” around the country.  Need more clarification on how devastating it was, recall James O’Keefe’s expose on how ballot harvesting works.  It’s practically South American political corruption worthy.  Amazing what was pulled off while the junk food generation sat around submissively locked in their homes watching Netflix while seismic shifting policies were aggressively passed right under their noses.  I Guess Bezmenov was onto something when he predicted the junk food generation’s inability to protect the Constitution after all.  

Think Squealer in Animal Farm who, as spokesman for the leaders of the comrade animals, gave reports of economic “success” based upon how the farm is performing under Napoleon compared to how it would have performed under the rule of Snowball.  The same Snowball whom the pigs would blame a broken window on even months after he had been chased off the farm by ravenous dogs.

Think of all the elites such as Mark Zuckerberg championing Universal Basic Income.  Oh yeah, think Pope Francis who has done the same.  The same Pope Francis who has given radical globalist social and fiscal engineer pro-abort Jeffery Sachs a regular spot at the table on a Vatican commission.  

Think the famous rant by Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) in Network (1976), who celebrated that “there are no nations”, “there is only one holistic system of systems” and who said that the only nations that actually exist anymore are Exxon, IBM, and AT&T.  After intimidating Howard Beale for attempting to fight National Sovreignty threatening big business deals, he assured Mr. Beale, in a climax of Apotheosis, that one day their children will see an age where there is no more suffering, everyone has a common share, there are no more wars, “all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredoms amused”.  

Finally, think of the Transhumanists of our Current Post-Modern, Post-Humanist world.  You want to talk about a counter faith to the genuine Catholic Faith, check out Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.  In 2005, Kurzweil was predicting that by the 2040’s man will change so radically in his very nature that he will totally reject his biological body and will enthusiastically load his “mindfile” into cyborg like bodies or into the cloud.  In his chapter, Ich ein un Singulitarian, he acknowledges that his Transhumanist manifesto does require him to take some leaps of faith, though he denies "Singulitarianism" is a religion.  I wonder if Ray had any influence over his former colleague at Google who legally registered the First Church of AI with the IRIS?  Afterall, Kurzweil did propose in the same book that God would finally exist at the “6th epoch of evolution” whereby mankind will ibe day infuse everything in the universe with intelligence, finally creating a God for man to worship.  But, hey, don’t worry about Kurzweil, he’s only the chief engineer for the same Google that uploads every conversation you have while your phone is on you into “the cloud”.  And yes, this is the same cloud that recent speaker at the WEF, Yuval Noah Harari celebrated as the place where humanity will be biogenetically redesigned.  Well, in all fairness, he did bring up the IBM cloud as well.  In case you have not caught the transcript yet, here is a sample,

      In the past, many tyrants and governments wanted to do it, but nobody understood
      biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack
      millions of people… neither the Gestapo or the KGB could do it.  But soon, at least
      some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people.

If global communism isn’t quite here, then I guess just sit back and wait a little bit longer.

How is the Faith the Answer?

I mean this question two ways.  1: How can the Church endure as the solution to all of the world’s problems?   2: How can this be the case with so much scandal within the Church?

When you really think about the answers, it should provide more encouragement than discouragement.  1. I have heard many people strangely use the word “relevance” to describe what the Church is “in danger” of losing if it does not “get with the times”.  I have heard students, randoms on social media, and people calling Catholic radio stations saying things to the effect of “if the Church doesn’t change it’s position on abortion, contraception, and same sex marriage, it will lose its relevance”.

How asinine and amazingly wrong.  How many Protestant congregations have embraced the sins of the modern age and come out more relevant as a result?  Take contraception for example.  If the Church changed its “position”, then she would not only be like every other “Faith” but she would be acknowledging that she does not teach infallibly on morals.  Which would diminish the Church’s credibility and prove as a source of invalidation against the Church.  By the way, the Church arrives at teachings that can be intelligibly arrived at.  Politicians have mutable “positions”, not the Church.  

The Church’s infallible teachings on all of these things that the Modernists have screamed for the Church to “change” on and that the Post-Modernists, the Transhumanists, and all the Communists will demand that the Church “change” on are a tremendous source of the Church’s relevance.  It’s how Pope John Paul II’s funeral was able to draw so many attendees from all throughout the world only 17 years ago, how Pope Benedict XVI was so obsessively hated by an ever fixated Big Leftist Media, and its how the world actually pays attention to Pope Francis consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary even today.  

On the second meaning of the question, consider the scandal that has existed throughout the History of the Church.  Remember that the Church is a hierarcy, yes, but the Hierarchical Church does not simply equal the Faith per se.  The Hierarchical Church is highly infiltrated and terribly corrupt.  True.  The ability to explain away the many gaffes, insane appointments (like Jeffery Sachs), the Pachamama, and all the rest of it become harder and harder each day.  When Pope Francis told faithful Catholics to stop reproducing like rabbits, it may have been the most insulting thing a cleric could have ever directed toward my family.  Clericalism at its worst.  Thanks for being such an enlightening example to your children and to your fraternity, Pope Francis.  It really has been a great nine years, hasn’t it?

But if you are willing to take the time to study Church history, you will find that these scandals pale in comparrison to the scandals of various popes during the Medieval and Reneissance times.  This really is the Church where Christ picked the man who denied him three times to be the first pope.  We will get through this, just like many Catholics have throughout the centuries.  

Francis does not stand alone as the avatar of the Faith.  Nevertheless, he holds the office necessary to hold up his end of the deal on what Our Lady of Fatima asked.  For that I am thankful.  

Now, let’s not sit around waiting for all the evil to stop just because he did his part.  Let’s do our end of the bargain as well.  Good news, its the same as it was on March 24th.  Stop sinning, live the sacramental life, and practice the faith.  

The Lenton countdown is at two and a half weeks.  What can you do right now to better hold on your end of the bargain?

God Bless,
Gadfly