Islam, Protestantism, Homosexuality, and Catholicism Part III

Islam, Protestantism, and Homosexuality are Heresies.

Part III

Homosexuality a heresy?

That may seem odd, as Protestantism is certainly a heresy (maybe not to them), but Islam is a separate religion (definitely to Muslims) and Homosexuality is something different again – and whatever it might be, a heresy it would not be it.

But it is. Read this from Rod Dreher's column of July 25, 2018, here. A pull quote from "James", who was a child abuse victim of the evil yes, evil, Theodore McCarrick: "They believe that they are more important than the religion itself,” James says. “They believe that man is better than God. That’s not possible. McCarrick believed that he was my direct contact with God. He told me that hundreds and hundreds of times: God will only listen to you when you are with me.”

Clearly, the evil McCarrick had left the True Faith years ago, decades ago (and maybe never had it), and had been living a lie, a lost soul in a made-up religion (if he were not a total atheist). 

So, if Corporate Homosexuality isn't a heresy in itself, it certainly fosters unbelief and lies and, yes, heresy in others.

Yet, in actuality, all three are Christian heresies, and they're heresies about the Incarnation. Most Protestants would say, and probably now most Catholics, following as they do since Vatican II the Protestant lead, that Christ's death on the Cross is the main point of Christianity: "Jesus died for your sins!" But the real point – the essential idea – of Christianity is the Incarnation: that God became a human being in the first place. (The Crucifixion is a part of that, rather than the Incarnation being a part of the Crucifixion.) Therein lies a tale, alright. God became a human being to alter and uplift our nature, to change us into New Creations in Christ.

·   This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:

·   John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation)

·   2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.

·   Two Old Testament examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26

The Greeks call this theosis. Here are two great saints on it, one Eastern and one Western:

·   St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]

·   St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

Protestantism formally disagrees with the Historical Church's* teaching on all this, the why of the necessity of the Incarnation, and Islam denies the Incarnation took place at all (because there are is only one "Person" in God, Allah, and "Allah's hand is not chained", i.e., He is required to do nothing, including save us. Whether we end up in Hell or the Garden of Allah is immaterial to Him, and he makes no promises, no covenants, because that would "chain His hand." (The most ardent Mujahideen Jihadi, no matter how many infidels he murders, has no guaranteed promised of anything in the Afterlife; certainly no virgins, all because Allah's hand is not chained; i.e. Allah makes no covenants. Sura 5.64)

Meanwhile, Homosexuality is a heresy in part because it denies Divine Revelation. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is, just as is Jesus in the New Testament, extremely concerned with our moral behavior. We simply MUST be moral, and give it our absolute best try -- there's no middle ground. "Be perfect," Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "as your Heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48) 

This ability to be righteous, to be "perfect" is denied by Protestants, from Luther on. They insist we are saved judicially, by Divine Fiat, but that our nature is not changed: Simul Justus et Peccator, as Luther phrased it: Simultaneously (both) justified and a sinner. We go to Heaven, as Luther put it, as manure piles covered with snow. Our nature is fallen, and putrid, but if we make an act of faith, God will declare us saved by virtue of His Son's sacrifice, and allow us into Heaven – even though spiritually, we're a stinking, rotten putrescence. We're declared righteous, but we're NOT righteous, no "new creation" in Christ.

All Catholics and all Protestants need to understand this cyclopean gulf between to two versions of Christianity.

Thus Luther famously wrote his assistant Philipp Melanchthon that he, Luther, could sin many times a day and it not affect his salvation and that Melanchthon should sin greatly, engage in big sins, for "Christ did not die for small sins."

But as Deuteronomy, in the Offer of Life or Death, puts it: 

11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. (Deuteronomy 30:11-14) 

This implies the Holy Spirit enables one to keep the Law, the very breath, the Word, in one's mouth.

To prove this, the "Righteous" are found throughout Holy Writ. For example, from Luke 1:5-6

⁵ In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. ⁶ Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. 

How did they manage that? No one is supposed to be righteous. Did not St. Paul say in Romans 3, and did not Luther start the Reformation on this, that no one is worthy? Not one? 

In Romans 3, St Paul had written, beginning with verse 10:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
11     there is no one who understands;
    there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away,
    they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good, not even one."


This begins St. Paul's quoting of six citations from the Old Testament, all of them from Psalms (except one from Isaiah: Romans 3:15-17 is from Is 59:7-8) The sequence opens with verses from Psalm 14 (Romans 3:19-12), then lines from Psalms 5, 140, 10 and 36. Let's look at Psalm 14 in its entirety. 
Psalm 14

Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;

    there is no one who does good.

2 The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind

    to see if there are any who are wise,

    who seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;

    there is no one who does good,

    no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers

    who eat up my people as they eat bread,

    and do not call upon the Lord?

5 There they shall be in great terror,

    for God is with the company of the righteous.

6 You would confound the plans of the poor,

    but the Lord is their refuge.

7 O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

    When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,

    Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

Psalm 14 goes along with clear denunciations of just about everyone, then suddenly, at verse 4, it begins to change. "My people" are mentioned, and then in 5, "God is with the company of the righteous."

Wait! Who the heck are these Righteous? No one is supposed to be righteous, right?

No, Luther got it wrong. All the Psalms quoted mention the Righteous, and compare/contrasts them with the wicked. (The Isaiah passages in that chapter don't have that, but the righteous are mentioned in nearby chapters.)

In other words, St Paul could not in any way have meant NO ONE, period, is righteous. When he quoted an OT verse, there were no chapter numbers or verses, and his audience was to immediately think of the section quoted, what the section overall was about. Psalm 14 is not long and was well-known, so clearly every Roman Christian reading Romans 3 – all of them trained in turn by Jewish Christians – would have understood what Paul was about. Luther, writing 1500 years later, was clueless.

So the Reformation was started by a German professor who didn't really understand his source material. Pretty pathetic, really.

But you see the importance of this related to Homosexuality, a thing Divine Revelation has always condemned, something directly contrary to God's intentions and also something that necessarily brings doom on those involved in it, as Romans 1 famously details. Today, wherein most male homosexuals have quite numerous intimate partners and are involved in drug and alcohol abuse – a doleful state homosexuals blame not on themselves, but on the large society not accepting them – and wherein most "Gay Marriages" are contracted without the partners intending to be monogamous. 

Men (most men, through a great part of their lives) have a tendency to be profligate, if possible. (Hence one aspect of the importance of Jesus' admonition about looking with lust.) Women, traditionally, wholly reject that because they need steady, permanent males to help protect them and their (and his) children. A tremendous amount of traditional Christian culture involves trying to encourage men to be Men, to fulfill their masculine duties to their females and children. 

Unless its adherents adopt, Homosexuality by its nature cannot give them any of this. It is one of the reasons Homosexuality tends to be unstable in relationships, and often violent. (Lesbians may have long-term relationships, for which they are famous, but they are hyper-intense connections and often violent.) And of course if they do adopt, they automatically deprive the child they adopted of the right to have a father and a mother. 

Therefore, Homosexual Inc, Corporate Homosexuality, denies traditional Christian doctrine, for as St. Paul wrote in First Corinthians 6:9-20

9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

Glorify God in Body and Spirit

12 “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything. 13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,”[e] and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, “The two shall be one flesh.” 17 But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple[f] of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

That is about as far from the lifestyles of most Homosexuals today as one can get, and still be talking about the same species.

An Préachán
Notes
* By "Historical Church" I mean the Orthodoxies: the Western Orthodox, i.e., Catholicism, whether the "Latin Rite" or its many Eastern Liturgy Churches who recognize the Pope; the Eastern Orthodox "in-communion-with-each-other" Churches who barely speak to each other – and can't anyway even if they wanted to because they're all hopelessly divided by their various national languages; and the Oriental Orthodox, which consist of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Copts and Ethiopes. ("Oriental" means Eastern, of course, but these are the original "Eastern" Churches, as what we in the West call "Eastern Orthodox" are breakaways from the Universal ("Catholic") Church. All of these Churches have Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacramental System.

Islam, Protestantism, Homosexuality, and the Catholic Church Part II

Islam, Protestantism, Homosexuality, and the Catholic Church
Part II
Narcissism, Anthropology, and the Race Track

Preface Continued from Part I

A point about Narcissism: Homosexuality is essentially Narcissistic, with its fear, hatred, or at least rejection of "the Sexual Other," and has been found in "advanced" cultures of effete urbanized elites, or in backward, retrograde cultures turned in on themselves – as with Islam or remote tribes in the jungles – for evidence of that latter, see the Peter Wood article linked to below.

For the basic modern idea about Homosexuality, the idea that "sold" it to the general public, is that people are "born that way." In 1977, only 10 percent of the U.S. population thought homosexuality was inherited, for example; it has risen ever since, to around 40-50 percent today. This Gallup polling shows the lobbying effects of "Gay, Inc." But what is the truth? In general, the current mainline thinking on how homosexuality is generated is probably as worthwhile as the "science" of Global Warming! Both are far to politically "hot" for scientists to be remotely objective. The most one might venture is it's probably due to a complex of factors, with the most weight cumulatively on the side of upbringing and home life, and for male homosexuals, their relationship with their father. (Curiously, I've never seen a study on that, but it seems very apparent that male homosexuals don't have strong, loving father-son relationships.) 

Mainstream scientists today tend to argue it isn't "learned" but "environmentally acquired", as here, wherein the author, an obviously unwise, blinder-bound scientist makes bold to write idiotically, "If homosexual people caused great societal damage, the way that psychopathic people do, we would disvalue homosexuality, whether homosexuality were innate (like psychopathy appears largely to be) or learned. But they don’t, and we shouldn’t." 

Oh? This researcher should tell that to the boys 'Uncle Teddy' McCarrick buggered. And not just that, but any knowledge of the Homosexual lifestyle in any culture, ancient or modern, shows it to be brutal and misogynist, for reasons explained anthropologically here, in a very important article by  the anthropologist Peter W. Wood.

Now, homosexual advocates would howl at all this, but "knowledge is power"; if you review the history of culture, you'll learn that adult men "imposing themselves" on teenage boys is the classic paradigm of traditional homosexual cultures (and that is exactly what the Catholic Church's sex scandal consist of). A culture that had two men of similar age as a "couple" was very rare. 

And every culture that had a strong element of Homosexuality in it was misogynist. Think of Ancient Greece in the Classical Age, wherein Homosexuality had a distinct military element to it, or traditional Muslim Arab culture at any time, past and present. For what was true in Ancient Greece and Rome and the Near East is even truer there today; the traditional Islamic culture is the most homosexual on Earth. And like Ancient Islam and Ancient Greece, quite violent.

Therefore, missing all this, intellectually curious neither about the science or the anthropology, many non-homosexual Catholic bishops and moralists see only the individual who has this burden, and try to minister to that individual, and thus not comprehend, apprehend, or "get" the titanically vast importance of the larger "program", as it were. But whatever one can say about any specific individual and their personal, spiritual, and moral struggles with homosexual attraction – Homosexuality as a corporate thing is itself far greater, and far more dangerous, than the sum of its parts. That's a truism about many things. It is very true about Homosexuality.

One simple example of this truism regarding Homosexuality is what happened in Boston to the St. Patrick's Day parade. Read here a detailed history of how small groups of homosexuals who wanted to march in it eventually resulted in St. Patrick himself leaving the parade, and anyone really Catholic – anyone accepting of the Church's ancient teachings on the subject – being driven clean out of the parade. It's a type of utterly intolerant YOU-WILL-TOLERATE-US-OR-ELSE totalitarian regime resulting in a WE-WON'T-TOLERATE-YOU reality. This phenomenon is widely known now about Homosexuality. It's the "Bake US a Cake or You Won't Bake at All" type of Homosexual threat-aggression. "You will be made to care." That slogan is horrific in its consequences. It's very real, very oppressive, and spreading ever further, contra the researcher's uncomprehending comment above.

One might say Homosexuality is like a weed, a weed that will eventually kill off or drive out every other plant in the garden. Or one might say, using religious speech. that Homosexuality is a jealous god and will have no other gods before it. From a Traditionalist Catholic perspective, of course, Homosexuality is not a weed, but a demon.

And it demands sacrifice.

This series of essays will therefore try to place that aspect of "Corporate Homosexuality" into its rightful place in the great scheme of things, particularly in how it relates to the other "worst" things confronting the Church, Islam and Protestantism. The goal is to make the point that we must "turn the corner" on Homosexuality. To recognize that, whatever or the Church's pastoral response to individual homosexuals is – and that would vary according to each individual, of course, as each person is an unique person created by God – Corporate Homosexuality, Homosexuality in the aggregate, is something deadly to the Faith. 

Only once that is clearly understood, then Homosexuality as a program, as an "alternative lifestyle" or a parallel and equally moral state to traditional Christian sexual practice, will be utterly rejected. (Or "disvalued" as the researcher quoted above put it.)

Introduction

These three things, Protestantism, Homosexuality and the Catholic Church, have been intersecting for some time now; this is a review of what is going on and of what is at stake.

Imagine a horse race track with three horses running on it. They’re pretty much nose-to-nose but it varies every time you look at them. There used to be more horses. The Arian horse ran away with the field for a while, then faltered, fell behind, and finally went lame. In the beginning, there was a Gnostic horse who seemed about to win the race, but he, too, faltered. Eventually a very strong horse appeared, an Arabian, actually, named Islam. That horse is still running. Then, 500 years ago, a second strong contender appeared, the Protestant horse. He first ran a bit behind the Islamic horse, and then they ran neck to neck, nose to nose, for about 100 years, until finally the Islamic horse fell rather far behind. By 1900, the Protestant horse was way ahead, many lengths. But then in the 1950s, and especially by the 1960s, Islam came on strong, and it was the Protestant horse that fell behind, or partially behind. But also in the 1960s a totally new horse appeared, or more precisely re-appeared, after have fallen out of the race during the great Church reforms of the 12^th century (Sts Francis and Dominic) that so strongly established the High Middle Ages Church (1053 to 1300). This is the Homosexual horse, and today that horse is nosing out the other two.

This is obviously a long-term race, lasting two millennia now, and these horses today on the track are the deadliest heresies the Church has ever faced. The race track is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church. These three horses look to be final contenders in conquering that prize, and all they need is the fourth, as yet unknown and unnamed, to make the Four Horsemen of Doom. (A "one-world" George Orwell 1984-type of world government might be such a horse.)

In Part III we'll look more closely into what the horses represent, especially regarding the Incarnation.

An Préachán

Islam, Protestantism, Homosexuality, and the Catholic Church Part I

Islam, Protestantism, Homosexuality, and the Catholic Church
Individual Homosexuals vs Corporate Homosexuality

The Catholic Priest Sex Abuse Scandal,
The Conceits of a Narcissistic Age,
And Heresy, Past and Present
Part I

Preface

We live in a Narcissistic Age, wherein "everything is about you" and your needs, and no one can interfere with your pursuit of satisfying your needs. 

It is the Age of Relativism, wherein "what's good for me is good for me, whatever it might happen to be, so keep your old-fashioned morality to yourself" has showed itself to be a "Dictatorship", and Benedict XVI once said. It is the age of Moralism, the tedious preaching of "Social Justice Warriors" in a perpetual condemnation of traditional society. 

These are the conceits of the age, and they're wrong, stupidly so. What people do privately has tremendous affect of the larger society, and even on the civilization itself. The Emperor Augustus once called young aristocrats into his presence to upbraid them for not marrying and starting families. The Roman state needed them to do so, the emperor explained, or there wouldn't be anyone to run the Roman state. Their personal pursuit of deviant pleasures was creating dire consequences for everyone. 

The Priest Sex Abuse Scandal (now quickly morphing into the Bishops' Sex Abuse Scandal), is yet another example of a horde of hedonists (heathen hedonists, actually), working in a mafia-style network of lies so they can scratch their itches on young men and boys – in the hopeless process of trying satisfy their perverse desires. They betray everything they took vows for, and betray the laity they're consecrated to serve, and also, of course, they betray God. They "have other gods before God", breaking the First Commandment. They take God's Name in vain every time they celebrate Mass. They break every Commandment. And they're bringing down the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church into the gutter with them. 

This sex abuse scandal is the worst thing to happen to the Catholic Church in its long history. Currently, it is edging out Islam and Protestantism in that regard (see Introduction in Part II). 

This essay is the first in a series here reflecting on this situation, and it takes a Traditionalist view of the Church, Church teaching (esp. about Homosexuality). Having no desire to go to the trouble of reinventing the wheel, I shall take traditional morality as true. To me this is self-evident. For example, I know that Amsterdam, infamous for its lack of rules and morality, became a Mecca for crime and drugs; so the government handed out clean needles in an effort to reduce disease but merely increased addiction, and made the problem much worse – San Francisco's Leftist junta is finding out the same is true for them, too. As a social conservative, and a conservative in politics and human nature, I – and many other such – could have told the Dutch and the San Frans what would happen. Human nature, in other words, is immutable. 

Of course, people exist who think differently. Thus we get a "conservative vs liberal" bifurcated political world. And a bifurcated social world. And a cultural world. And a religious world, as well.  

Many don't like to apply the phrase "Left and Right" to religion. They're foolish. At bottom, the difference between "Left and Right" involves how human nature is understood, and then how that understanding is applied to everything. "Conservatives" are conservatives because they believe people are basically bad, or naturally prone to being bad, rather than good. It's much easier for people to be bad than good, at least. The Christian teaching of Original Sin fits this: G. K. Chesterton said you could prove the doctrine of Original Sin by merely opening the daily newspaper. 

A "liberal" or "Progressive" or Leftist believes people are basically good, however, and they actually think that rules, from the Ten Commandments on down, are what make people bad. Remove the rules, they think, and watch a 100 flowers bloom (to conjure Mao). Marx, for example, thought money was bad and people were on the evolutionary path to a "Communist state," and earthly utopia wherein no one cared about money. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." (Of course, to get there, those who did care about money all had to be shot.) It's sort of a heretical understanding of what St. Paul says about law and sin in Romans 5:12-14.

So, the bottom line: if you're liberal/Leftist, then live without rules in your own life. See how that works out. (Hint: it didn't work out for Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 1712-1778, the philosophical founder of all Leftism; it won't work out for you, either.)

Now, on to business:
As for the American Catholic Church and Homosexuality, this report below suggests how bad the situation is:

About half the U.S. bishops are homosexual:

Recent revelations about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick are only “the tip of the iceberg”, according to Father Dariusz Oko, a University lecturerer in Krakow, Poland.

Oko said to LifeSiteNews.com (July 26) that it is estimated that about 30-40% of priests and 40-50% of bishops in the USA have homosexual inclinations.

According to Oko “at least half of them, at least periodically, may commit serious abuses”.

He adds that the problem lies in the fact that [liberal] gay mafias are ruling dioceses, monasteries and seminaries. They even prevent the ordination of normal men.

An Préachán again:
Even assuming this is only half true (and most observers of the Catholic scene are coming to think half might be too optimistic!), it is still a devastating revelation.

And it's been around awhile, too. For example, Francis "Franny" Cardinal Spellman, Cardinal Archbishop of New York from '39 to '67, was widely reputed – it was just a given – to be an active homosexual; but leave aside the gossip: one point that subtly suggests it is true is because "Franny" was equally widely known to be a friend of the Traditional Mass of St. Gregory the Great, and in general an "arch conservative" in many things (yes, he is today considered a true hypocrite by both the Church's Left and Right) yet he unaccountably "folded" in defending Church tradition against "The Spirit of Vatican II". (Spellman died in December of 1967.)

One way to explain that is that he just suddenly changed his mind about it all; but it is more believable, more logical, that he was blackmailed. Blackmailing homosexuals was a long-standing pastime of blackmailers, especially those involved in espionage. It certainly was a literary cliché. But back in the pre-World War II days, we never had the sort of numbers of homosexuals in the priesthood or the episcopacy as we do today: it's prevalent, something we've never seen the scale of before, at least not since the days of Saint Peter Damian (1007 to 1072), who was involved in a huge Church housecleaning at that time. The Medieval Monastic Church, which lasted from the invasion of Islam in the 7th century till 1053, was on its way out, and a new, High Middle Ages Church was aborning. As one avatar of the Church collapses, there's always another one in the offing.

Reviewing some of the evidence as to how deep and widespread the unspeakable rot is in the present-day Church, the Vatican II Church, especially via Rod Dreher's columns in The American Conservative, I would have to agree with "James", who was abused by Theodore McCarrick when a child, that "If Pope Francis doesn’t act clearly and strongly to clean up this mess, says James, the Catholic Church will collapse under the weight of the bishops’ corruption." ("James" has left the Church, BTW.) 

I don't think Pope Francis will remotely do what is necessary. In fact, just recently, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a truly evil sex predator, resigned his cardinalate. Resigning is too good for him, but maybe he'll be the first "domino to fall". We'll have to see. However, the pope should have "defrocked" him rather than waiting for the wretch to do it himself.

John Paul II didn't do much about it either, after all, and he was not only a Believer, but quite orthodox (for a Vatican II prelate). Pope Jorge Bergoglio seems to be a Believer in a non-Catholic theology, and definitely in an all-permissive deity – one who presumably tolerates a lot of priestly sodomy, or at least is not a "rigorist" about it. (This is a joke, as Bergoglio is always on about "rigorists" priests.) Benedict XVI tried to address the Homosexual crucifixion of the Church a lot more than did either JP2 or Bergogio, or both of them together – and for B16's pains he was ousted. 

So...

The Catholic Church will indeed collapse under the weight of the bishops' corruption. But to be specific, it's the Vatican II Church that is breaking to pieces as we look on. Honestly, it's been a slow-motion "crash and burn" train wreck since it came into being. We've not had a more immoral, or at least morally lax, Church than Vat 2 since the Bourbon Church (1648 to 1789.) And the degenerate Bourbons still taught orthodox Catholic teachings – they just didn't live them. 

A remnant of the Church will survive, of course, just as was the case with Ancient Israel. What will survive will be what's called "Traditional Catholicism" in the Latin Rite, what I like to hopefully call The Reconquista Church. That, and of course the small, numerous Churches in Communion with Rome who worship via Eastern liturgies.

One of the issues killing the Vat 2 Church, besides bad bishops (many of whom are homosexuals themselves, as suggest above), is simply that we've not "turned the corner" on Homosexuality in our own minds. 

Turning the Corner on Homosexuality

By that I mean Homosexuality isn't an aggregate of individuals engaged in a particular kind of physical intimacy. It's greater than that. Just as democracy isn't just some city states here or there, or a nation now and then, that practice "rule by the people" but is instead a powerful, glorious (and dangerous to many), and even quite unstable, idea of government. And just as a national literature is more than merely a collection of authors over a period of time in one national language, but a "mystic chord of memory" (to quote Lincoln) that gives identity. Lincoln applied his phase to a shared history – and it works there too: literature and shared history can actually create a people and sustain them over time. Same with religion. Islam and Judaism and Christianity (and the others) are NOT just the private belief systems of accumulated individuals. They're life-shaping, cultural-defining angels of creation. Powerful. Real. Reality shifting. 

It is ironic that all of this insight modern culture denies. "Democracy isn't much, just a myth we told each other in the past, as we abused one another for our own gain. Literature and history are just pathetic narratives, woven mythologies design to fool the ignorant." 

And religion? "None of your business. Private. Subjective. Personal. And physically intimate relations, too: just what adults do with whom they want, or by themselves, and no one's concern." 

I am describing, of course, what Benedict XVI called the Dictatorship of Relativism.

So it is that many bishops – and a good portion of the modern Vatican II laity – haven't come to see how dangerous a thing Homosexuality itself is. (Note that I capitalize it here, but not in adjectival reference to individual homosexuals.) "What two (or more) individuals do in their privacy is no concern of anyone else. That they happen to be both males or females is immaterial." This is false, false manifestly, and deeply stupid. Only being so narcissistic an idea does it survive a moment's reflection, for we live in a Narcissistic age: for any society that doesn't believe its own history is going to blow apart. Any society that has no common literature or tongue will suffer the Curse of Babel. And any society that removes the ancient controls on sexual behavior turns vicious, misogynist, and childless. The histories of classical Greece and pagan Rome perfectly example this. 

The modern (and Modernist) bishops and laity see the trees, not the looming Mirkwood beyond, and certainly not the deeply embedded Dol Guldur in the dark heart of it. 

For just as with a company, or a government department, or a church, as well, the thing itself is greater than the sum of its parts. This is crucial to understand: regardless of the spiritual and moral state of individual homosexuals, regardless of their personal struggles with it, regardless of individuals and family members we know and love, and whatever pity their struggles should elicit in us, it is the thing itself, Homosexuality per se, what one might call "Corporate Homosexuality" that is the elephant in the room – or more precisely Xochipilli, the Aztec demon-god for the vice, for Homosexuality is indeed far more than the sum of any group of individual homosexuals. ("Gay" websites, i.e., websites supporting the "Gay Party Line", proudly list many, many such deities, not realizing these are demons, demons who are, obviously, "legion".)

It is essential, in other words, to "turn the corner" and realize we're not dealing only with individuals – important as they are, but a vice that has a mind of its own, a program that easily runs counter to what a great many individuals caught up it it want; it is a system contrary – not parallel to – traditional man-woman intimacy. And it is like a computer program that will, like a malware virus, rewrite the source code of civilization. (Assuming, as conservatives do, that Western Civilization is founded on one-man, one woman family life.)

Added to that, many Catholic hierarchs and their attendant minions don't think homosexuality is a sin. That Vatican II Church chestnut about homosexual attraction not being a sin, or perhaps in more modern language, "being gay" is not a sin, but acting on it is – is worthless. It is worthless because any gay ideologue will tell you the whole point is to "act on" it, to "be yourself" or "be true to what you are." Not to "live a lie" by being celibate. To be, in a word, "free" to be "out" and proud and not crippling yourself by somehow not practicing it. 

To put it in a more logical way: if feeling X is not a sin, then why is practicing X a sin? It's a classic Vatican II type of argument, almost self-contradictory and clearly not thought out. In contrast, Our Lord said if one even looks at a woman with lust, one commits adultery. That is a very high standard, indeed. But we live in a hedonistic world, such a relativist world, and clearly a very Narcissistic one, so naturally Xochipilli is widely worshiped. With "pride". 

Continued in Part II

An Préachán

A Response to Bill Donohue About that Wretch, Theodore McCarrick

Catholic League president Bill Donohue recently wrote a response to the revelations about Cardinal McCarrick. The well-known defender of the Church (via the Catholic League) wrote, in part:

A little over a year after assuming the reins of the Catholic League, I started exchanging letters with Newark Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. He was genuinely supportive of our efforts. On October 17, 1994, he wrote to me saying, “I have been speaking to the bishops of New Jersey at our Provincial meeting and encouraging them to support the work of the Catholic League in their own dioceses.”

Now he is bearing a heavy cross. The takeaway for me is clear. ...

Mr Donohue goes on to write what I suppose would be considered a muted and sympathetic essay in Christian charity, and ends by asking us to pray for Cardinal McCarrick.

Very nice, but utterly deficient.

Why? Because: Enough of this obscenity is enough, and we're long past "enough".

First of all, Mr Donohue has no way of knowing whether a congenital liar like McCarrick (who lied for decades about what he was "into", and who lied to all and sundry, up to and including a man the current pope has canonized: John Paul II) could remotely be "genuinely supportive of our efforts". Lying and falsely representing themselves is the essential problem with homosexual clerics: one has no way of knowing how honest they are about anything. Their lives are a lie, and they lie to cover that reality up.

The Homosexual Rape of the Church

Sin makes you stupid, or as Aquinas put it, "Sin darkens the intellect." In McCarrick's case – and in the case of all homosexuals in the clergy – sin makes liars of them as well, or they would have never been allowed into the clergy in the first place. They falsely represented themselves to get in, or had older homosexuals let them in, for "favors".

Liars, and thieves, too, they are: thieves spiritual, thieves physical (rape, molestation) and thieves of ecclesiastical reputation. They've destroyed the reputation of the Catholic Church. It will take 500 years of extremely serious efforts by all the clergy to even remotely begin to restore the Church's reputation. And homosexuality has devastated Church morale. It is incredible (in a literal sense) how devastated Church morale is by these perverts, worming their way into the vitals of the Church, like maggots or parasites. (They've gutted the "Vatican II" Church, certainly, and hastened its collapse.) Were the Church not divinely inspired and sustained, truly, it would die. Read the disgust and anguish of Michael Brendan Dougherty here, for an example:

An excerpt:

There is an undeniable psychological tension between my religious belief that I cannot have hope for salvation outside the visible, institutional Church and my honest conviction that of all the institutions and societies that intersect with my life, the Church is by far the most corrupt, the most morally lax, the most disillusioning, and the most dangerous for my children. In that tension, personal prayer will dry up like dew at noon.

That's how bad this situation is. But let us put it in historical perspective:

• The Protestant Reformation has been with us 500 years. It has gone a long way – via the "Vatican II Church" and the alterations of the Mass and all our other devotions – in turning the modern Catholic Church into a Protestant denomination (despite occasional claims otherwise).
• Islam has been with us 1400 years. It, too, is the "gift that keeps on giving". 
• And now we have a homosexual mafia burrowed into the heart of the Church, a true parasite apparently resisting every effort to remove it.

Make no mistake about any of them. All three of these crucifixions directly attack the central Christian revelation of the Incarnation.

• Islam is Christianity's "kill shot", denying the Incarnation root and branch, insisting that God is one person, not three, let alone not allowing one of them incarnating Himself to save us from sin.
• Protestantism accepts the Incarnation, certainly, but takes the reason for it away. All one has to do is call on the Lord and one is saved, having accepted God as one's Savior. (Romans 10:13; the most Protestant verse in the Bible).
• But Protestantism teaches this salvation requires no change of one's nature. We are, as Luther said, Simul Justus et Peccator, simultaneously justified before God but also still a sinner, or as he metaphorically put it, we are each a manure pile covered with snow, the snow being God's grace and the manure pile our permanent human (fallen) nature. (This is, of course, grotesque; see C.S. Lewis' questioning of this teaching in his 10th Letter to Malcolm, in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, for one example of a push back against the notion.)
• This foundational Protestant idea denies the New Testament doctrine that Christians are now a new creation in Christ, that our nature is changed; indeed, that we are "born again" by the Holy Spirit through baptism and reception of the Most Holy Eucharist, which changes our nature through what the Greeks call theosis, and the West, Divinization. For example:

·   St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]

·   St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]

·   This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:

·   John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation)

·   2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.

• It is because of this change in our nature that Catholicism has always been adamantly set against sin. Sin can have no place in a Christian's life, as St. Paul teaches throughout his writings. (Example: 1 Cor 6:9-11) But because the modern (and Modernist) Church is essentially Protestant – Luther famously wrote that he could sin many times a day and it not affect his assurance of salvation – it now teaches that we cannot live up to the moral law, and must accept moral failure and yet have no fear of our salvation, because the Church essentially now accepts Simul Justus et Peccator.
  

What Homosexuality Demands

Now, what homosexuality does is to create a third cross for Christianity to bear: whereas Islam denies the Incarnation essentially, and Protestantism denies the Incarnation as necessary for our theosis, and denies theosis essentially, so "GayChurch" now embraces "incarnation" in a wholly prurient, carnal, and libidinous sense: we are sex objects to violate. Isn't THAT what the homosexual clergy do? They violate: they violate their vows and the Ten Commandments as much as they violate altar boys and seminarians. And of these three crucifixions: denying the reality of the Incarnation, misunderstanding the salvic nature of the Incarnation, or literally buggering the Incarnation, which is obviously worse? (N.B. Traditional Arabic Islamic culture is one of the most homosexual on Earth, despite Koranic teaching; and Protestantism never had any relationship to homosexuality except to condemn it, until the latter 20th century when "mainline" Protestant Churches embraced it. More traditional types of Protestantism continue to reject it, of course. The Catholic Church is torn between these positions; Traditional Catholicism continues to uphold the ancient teaching, with Progressive Catholics going the mainline Protestant route.) 

So, therefore, with all this in mind and reminding everyone I am not God, and do not make final judgements on anyone's soul's eternal fate, I answer Mr Donohue thusly, (and certainly do not think it is "over the top"): Pray for Cardinal McCarrick? I myself pray for Cardinal McCarrick, alright. Indeed, in an utmost earnest fervor, I pray that he go to Hell quickly – if that is his destiny. I am not God and I cannot send him there, but he ought to go. Few deserve it more. Why? He has spent decades upon decades lying, bearing false witness, coveting the bodies of young men in his charge, imposing himself on them, perhaps murdering their salvation, and blaspheming and directly insulting God Himself, all Three Persons, but especially the Second and Third. (Allegations that these evils were few in number or long ago are irrelevant: it happened, and it no doubt happened many more times than reported; and McCarrick lied about it for decades.) Theodore McCarrick is a soul vampire, an undead who recreates his hideousness in the young men he's violated.

Dante put homosexuals in the Seventh Circle of Hell, below even murderers and suicides. Considering what McCarrick and those like him have done over long lives, it is, simply, quite apropos.

He can go join "Franny" Spellmen in the bottom of the seventh circle of Hell. At least he won't lack for company.

N.B. Not I do not say McCarrick is unforgivable. Were he to "come out" and admit all, instead of hiding behind the Church's lawyers, as he is doing right now – were he to "name names" and finally, for once in a long life of soul-damning deceit, be honest – maybe he can avoid the serious possibility of Hell that he now faces. But don't hold your breath. "Sin darkens the intellect", indeed. And the last thing the GayChurch wants is true conversion.

An Préachán

The Suicide Rate Suggests How Ill Western Civilization Is

The "Kirk Wager" and the suicide rate: https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/the-kirk-wager/

An essay by Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club

An excerpt:

What if humanity is no longer sacred to itself and too few can be persuaded to make the Kirk Wager? Then we should observe what we actually see. The epidemic of suicide and the collapsing demography of the West. America's "suicide rate keeps rising, but nobody plans on doing anything about it," says Foreign Policy, calling it a national security issue. "Imagine if more than 40,000 people a year died from terrorist attacks in this country?" But 40,000 American suicides a year is peanuts compared to what Europe is doing to itself. Joel Kotkin in Forbes reels off the demographic numbers:

The most important EU country, Germany, has endured demographic decline for over a generation. Germany’s population is forecast to drop 7.7% by 2050 ... we can expect Germany to shrink as well as get very old ... Bulgaria’s population expected to shrink 27% by 2050 and Romania’s 22%. ... Things are not that much better in Western Europe, where fertility rates are also below replacement rates, but not quite so low. Long-term, the only option for Europe may be to allow more immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East, although this may be impossible due to growing political resistance to immigration.

Unless changed it will proceed inexorably.  As Thomas Andrews was reported to have told Captain Smith "the pumps will buy you time, but minutes only. From this moment on, no matter what we do, Titanic will founder. It is a mathematical certainty."