The emerging police state

 

Just as the Nazis used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to instill "order," so today radical leftists are using the three hour riot in the Capitol to initiate a broader police state.  See here.

In his Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II warned us that, "....totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people. Their self-interest as a class, group or nation would inevitably set them in opposition to one another. If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others. People are then respected only to the extent that they can be exploited for selfish ends. Thus, the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate — no individual, group, class, nation or State. Not even the majority of a social body may violate these rights, by going against the minority, by isolating, oppressing, or exploiting it, or by attempting to annihilate it.." (No. 44).

Under Francis, the emerging signs of the end times are intensifying...

Update: Catholic scholar says that the official persecution of faithful Catholics under Francis has begun.  See here.

An example of this persecution here.


"For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. But the one who restrains is to do so only for the present, until he is removed from the scene. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord (Jesus) will kill with the breath of his mouth and render powerless by the manifestation of his coming, the one whose coming springs from the power of Satan in every mighty deed and in signs and wonders that lie, and in every wicked deceit for those who are perishing because they have not accepted the love of truth so that they may be saved. Therefore, God is sending them a deceiving power so that they may believe the lie, that all who have not believed the truth but have approved wrongdoing may be condemned." (2 Thessalonians 2: 7-12).

Philip Johnson, in his book "Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture, tells a story which is both amusing and frightening at the same time. He writes: "I am convinced that conscious dishonesty is much less important in intellectual matters than self-deception...The German biologist Bruno Muller-Hill tells a memorable story to illustrate his thesis that 'self-deception plays an astonishing role in science in spite of all the scientists' worship of truth':

When I was a student in a German gymnasium and thirteen years old, I learned a lesson that I have not forgotten...One early morning our physics teacher placed a telescope in the school yard to show us a certain planet and its moons. So we stood in a long line, about forty of us. I was standing at the end of the line, since I was one of the smallest students. The teacher asked the first student whether he could see the planet. No, he had difficulties, because he was nearsighted. The teacher showed him how to adjust the focus, and that student could finally see the planet and the moons. Others had no difficulty; they saw them right away. The students saw, after a while, what they were supposed to see. Then the student standing just before me - his name was Harter - announced that he could not see anything. 'You idiot,' shouted the teacher, 'you have to adjust the lenses.' The student did that and said after a while, 'I do not see anything, it is all black.' The teacher then looked through the telescope himself. After some seconds he looked up with a strange expression on his face. And then my comrades and I also saw that the telescope was nonfunctioning; it was closed by a cover over the lens. Indeed, no one could see anything through it.'

Muller-Hill reports that one of the docile students became a professor of philosophy and director of a German TV station. 'This might be expected,' he wickedly comments. But another became a professor of physics, and a third a professor of botany. The honest Harter had to leave school and go to work in a factory. If in later life he was ever tempted to question any of the pronouncements of his more illustrious classmates, I am sure he was firmly told not to meddle in matters beyond his understanding.'" (pp. 156-157).

Do we honestly believe that this herd mentality is not to be found throughout our society and even in the Church? If so, we deceive ourselves. Pope Benedict XVI has warned of a liberal notion of conscience which is nothing less than a retreat from truth. In a keynote address of the Tenth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Catholic Conscience: Foundation and Formation," he says that liberalism's idea of conscience is that: "Conscience does not open the way to the redemptive road to truth - which either does not exist or, if it does, is too demanding. It is the faculty that dispenses with truth. It thereby becomes the justification for subjectivity, which would not like to have itself called into question. Similarly, it becomes the justification for social conformity. As mediating value between the different subjectivities, social conformity is intended to make living together possible. The obligation to seek the truth terminates, as do any doubts about the general inclination of society and what it has become accustomed to. Being convinced of oneself, as well as conforming to others, is sufficient. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he has, the better for him."

Is there really any difference between Harter's classmates, who insisted that they could see a planet and its moons when such was impossible, and those who succumb to social conformity and insist that an unborn baby is not really a human being when all the scientific evidence suggests otherwise?

Where will radical subjectivism ultimately lead us? It was Romano Guardini [in his classic The Lord, p. 513] who reminded us that: "One day the Antichrist will come: a human being who introduces an order of things in which rebellion against God will attain its ultimate power. He will be filled with enlightenment and strength. The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence witout Christ is possible - nay rather, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed. His arguments will be so impressive, supported by means of such tremendous power - violent and diplomatic, material and intellectual - that to reject them will result in almost insurmountable scandal, and everyone whose eyes are not opened by grace will be lost. Then it will be clear what the Christian essence really is: that which stems not from the world, but from the heart of God; victory of grace over the world; redemption of the world, for her true essence is not to be found in herself, but in God, from whom she has received it. When God becomes all in all, the world will finally burst into flower."

More than forty years ago, when things were much better than they are today, Pope Paul VI said, "There is a great uneasiness, at this time, in the world and in the Church, and that which is in question is the faith.  It so happens now that I repeat to myself the obscure phrase of Jesus in the Gospel of St. Like: 'When the Son of Man returns, will He still find faith on the earth?'  It so happens that there are books coming out in which the faith is in retreat on some important points, that the episcopates are remaining silent and these books are not looked upon as strange.  This, to me, is strange.  I sometimes read the Gospel passage of the end times and I attest that, at this time, some signs of this end are emerging."

If Pope Paul VI were still with us today, he would be alarmed at the growth of these emerging signs.  Under Francis, the perennial teachings of the Church are not simply in retreat, they are under full assault as those who adhere to them are silenced or demoted.  See here and here for example.

The Church is splitting into two camps: The Mystical Body of Christ and the Mystical Body of Antichrist.

The choice is ours as to which camp we identify with.  But there are consequences in the next life.

Pope Francis, Cuba and the emerging World Socialist State

Writing for the Acton Institute, Joe Carter explains that, "The U.S. began imposing sanctions against Cuba after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, nationalized the economy, and stole more than $1 billion in American assets on the island.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba broke off in 1961 as tensions between the two nations increased after Cuba signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. Even though the Cold War ended, not much has changed in the relationship between Cuba and the U.S."

Why is it that even though Cuba hasn't changed at all and is as repressive a regime as ever that Pope Francis worked with President Barack Obama to rescind sanctions against Cuba which have been in place for more than fifty years?  Why the secret meetings at the Vatican behind closed doors?

The forces behind the Socialist Society will not be deterred. They are determined to destroy the old society in order to build an atheistic society on its ashes. Archbishop Fulton Sheen writes, "Dostoyevsky, who understood atheism better than Nietzsche and who saw it coming in his own beloved land, knew that atheism had to be associated with the destruction of the old society. There was some suggestion that an overplanned or socialistic society had to be the prelude of an atheistic society. As he made one of his characters say: 'If Aloysha had not believed in God, he would have become a socialist.'

For the man-god to grow in age and wisdom, two conditions must be fulfilled. The heavens must be emptied, and man must be secularized. Both will be achieved by turning freedom into license. Men will be asked to give up God because His Commandments 'enslave' and because our will often runs counter to His. When finally everyone has his own will and does whatever he pleases, then there will be a chaos due to the conflict of egotisms.

It will then be necessary for Big Brother, or the state, to organize this chaos into a closed socialist society and the formulas given by the character, Shigalev, the theorist of the Communism to come: 'Having set out from unlimited freedom, I have ended up with unlimited despotism.' What Dostoyevsky was predicting through his characters, Nietzsche was saying through his philosophy. As he put it: 'I heralded the coming of the tragic era. We must be prepared for a long succession of demolitions, devastations, and upheavals...There will be wars such as the world has never seen. Europe will soon be enveloped in darkness. We shall watch the rising of the black tide.' And in another work, he wrote: 'A catastrophe is at hand. A catastrophe whose name I know*, whose name I shall not tell...Then all the earth will writhe in convulsions.'" (Fulton Sheen, essay entitled "The Death of God"). * John 5:43.

Years ago Father Malachi Martin, in his excellent work entitled, "The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church," noted that: "In reality, Liberation Theology is a quicker-than-the-eye transformation of a spiritual warfare into a sociopolitical struggle; and - if need be - into an armed revolutionary warfare against capitalism.  It is a transformation hinted at by Teilhard [Pere Teilhard  Dr Chardin, S.J.] in his theory of man endeavoring to evolve to the Omega Point by achieving complete' hominization' so that he could pass over into the 'Ultra-Human.' Indeed, Liberation Theologians were the ones who finally succeeded in giving all those airy concepts of Teilhard Dr Chardin a practical meaning." (The Jesuits, p. 312).

For these "New theologians," [and Pope Francis the Jesuit approves of them and has lived and moved in their circles], "Sin is not primarily personal; it is social and almost exclusively the injustice and oppressions due to capitalism.  Mary the Virgin is the Mother of a revolutionary Jesus - indeed of all revolutionaries seeking to overthrow Capitalism.  The Kingdom of God is the socialist state from which capitalist oppression has been eliminated.  Priesthood is either the service given by an individual [the priest] who builds up socialism, or it is the 'people of God's as it worships according to its likes...the New 'theological' lexicon not only justifies but mandates the use of any means - including armed violence, torture, violator human rights, deceptions, and deep alliances with professedly atheistic and antireligious forces such as the USSR [at the time, although her demise is more pretense than reality, see Golitsyn's New Lies for Old and The Perestroika Deception] and Castro's Cuba - in order to achieve the 'evolution' of Marxism and its promise of material success." (The Jesuits, p. 312).

Socialists are uniting within and without the Church to defeat their entrenched foe.  See here.

Related reading here.

Cuba's human rights abuses.  See here.

The Schaum family: Victims of the emerging Moloch State...

Recently, a district court sentenced parents of nine to pay a fine of 700 Euro each for their violation of the compulsory school attendance for all children in Germany. The public prosecution department demanded six months in prison for the married couple due to their repeated offense. An appeal was rejected in October.

 

The father, Thomas Schaum, 51, explains the reason for his third conviction: he did not want to give his children in the hands of strangers. He also criticised the sexual education that children received in schools. Three of the nine children of the Schaums are in school age. The married couple has already homeschooled the older children that are now between 17 and 25 years old. All of them have attended the last year of school and finished with excellent grades. Child protection services have confirmed that the family is not endangering the childrens’ well-being.

 

Just this month, an appeal launched by the parents was rejected and the fine of 700 Euro each was upheld.  See here.

At its website, under the section entitled "When do Kids Start Becoming Curious About Sex," the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asserts that infants and toddlers are curious about their own bodies and states that, "Children are human beings and therefore sexual beings.." See here. And this at a time when psychologists are pushing to decriminalize pedophilia.

This is the essence of the new anti-Christian sex education in preparation for the Moloch State. As George Kendall explains in Witness for the Truth, this sex education "radically separates sex from the very idea of the covenanted love of man and woman. Sex becomes merely a self-centered appetite to be satisfied and not a gift of self to another. As a result, what this kind of education produces is the lonely, autonomous individual. This is the ultimate in alienation. The autonomous individual is alienated even from his own body, which becomes to him only a thing, too - a thing to be used as a means to his autonomous pleasure. The end result is depersonalization which, if it lasts into eternity without being healed, means eternal loss. Few have put it as eloquently as Randy Engel did: 'Is it any wonder that the state must wage war against the family? For the state requires not individuals who dream, and think, and pray, but rather what has come to be called 'the mass man' - rootless, unaffirmed, a reactor - a mere reed blowing in the wind - a thing to be manipulated, to be used, to be disposed of, but never, never, to be loved, for the giant has no heart. And since the modern state has no heart, that which men previously have done out of love, must now be done out of fear, and hatred, and brute force.' So clearly, centemporary sex education, 'Catholic' or otherwise, is a profound attack on human dignity and on the human person.." (Witness for the Truth, pp. 399-400. citing Randy Engel "The Family Under Siege," Wanderer, March 6, 1980).

And now I would add, satanic. The United States, like the other Termite Nations of the West, is fast-becoming a Moloch State which claims total jurisdiction over man. It is becoming (and some of us would argue has already become) a demon-state which rejects God's Commandments and His plan for the human family. This demon-state (and make no mistake about it, our leaders increasingly have recourse to demons) denies that there is any transcendent, higher-than-human voice or authority that cares for man. R.J. Rushdoony explains that:

"The Moloch State simply represents the supreme effort of man to command the future, to predestine the world, and to be as God. Lesser efforts, divination, spirit-questing, magic and witchcraft are equally anathema to God. All represent efforts to have the future on other than God's terms, to have a future apart from and in defiance of God. They are assertions that the world is not of God but of brute factuality, and that man can somehow master the world and the future by going directly to the raw materials thereof."

Enter the Man of Sin.

Pope Benedict XVI: "...the first step towards salvation.."

A few days ago, before giving the traditional Christmas blessing to the City of Rome and the world ("urbi et orbi"), Pope Benedict XVI reflected on the Child of Bethlehem as Savior.  His Holiness said (in part): "He was sent by God the Father to save us above all from the evil deeply rooted in man and in history: the evil of separation from God, the prideful presumption of being self-sufficient, of trying to compete with God and to take his place, to decide what is good and evil, to be the master of life and death.."


The Holy Father said that human beings cannot save themselves from this sin, "unless we rely on God's help, unless we cry out to him: 'Veni ad salvandum nos! -- Come to save us!'"

He affirmed, though, that "the very fact that we cry to heaven in this way already sets us aright; it makes us true to ourselves: We are in fact those who cried out to God and were saved."

The Bishop of Rome spoke of God as the physician, while we are the infirm. And to realize this, he said, "is the first step towards salvation, towards emerging from the maze in which we have been locked by our pride. To lift our eyes to heaven, to stretch out our hands and call for help is our means of escape, provided that there is Someone who hears us and can come to our assistance."

"Jesus Christ is the proof that God has heard our cry," the Pope declared. "And not only this! God's love for us is so strong that he cannot remain aloof; he comes out of himself to enter into our midst and to share fully in our human condition. The answer to our cry which God gave in Jesus infinitely transcends our expectations, achieving a solidarity which cannot be human alone, but divine. Only the God who is love, and the love which is God, could choose to save us in this way, which is certainly the lengthiest way, yet the way which respects the truth about him and about us: the way of reconciliation, dialogue and cooperation." (See here).

There is a famous hymn written by Martin Luther which begins, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.." For all too many people today (including sadly, many Catholics) the conscience has become a "mighty fortress" built so as to shelter one from the exacting demands of truth. In the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "In the Psalms we meet from time to time the prayer that God should free man from his hidden sins. The Psalmist sees as his greatest danger the fact that he no longer recognizes them as sins and thus falls into them in apparently good conscience. Not being able to have a guilty conscience is a sickness...And thus one cannot aprove the maxim that everyone may always do what his conscience allows him to do: In that case the person without a conscience would be permitted to do anything. In truth it is his fault that his conscience is so broken that he no longer sees what he as a man should see. In other words, included in the concept of conscience is an obligation, namely, the obligation to care for it, to form it and educate it. Conscience has a right to respect and obedience in the measure in which the person himself respects it and gives it the care which its dignity deserves. The right of conscience is the obligation of the formation of conscience. Just as we try to develop our use of language and we try to rule our use of rules, so must we also seek the true measure of conscience so that finally the inner word of conscience can arrive at its validity.


For us this means that the Church's magisterium bears the responsibility for correct formation. It makes an appeal, one can say, to the inner vibrations its word causes in the process of the maturing of conscience. It is thus an oversimplification to put a statement of the magisterium in opposition to conscience. In such a case I must ask myself much more. What is it in me that contradicts this word of the magisterium? Is it perhaps only my comfort? My obstinacy? Or is it an estrangement through some way of life that allows me something which the magisterium forbids and that appears to me to be better motivated or more suitable simply because society considers it reasonable? It is only in the context of this kind of struggle that the conscience can be trained, and the magisterium has the right to expect that the conscience will be open to it in a manner befitting the seriousness of the matter. If I believe that the Church has its origins in the Lord, then the teaching office in the Church has a right to expect that it, as it authentically develops, will be accepted as a priority factor in the formation of conscience." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Keynote Address of the Fourth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts," February 1984).

In the same address, Cardinal Ratzinger explains that, "Conscience is understood by many as a sort of deification of subjectivity, a rock of bronze on which even the magisterium is shattered....Conscience appears finally as subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard."

A broken conscience, an ill-formed conscience, becomes a mighty fortress which shuts the truth out. Have we built an interior castle, as did St. Teresa of Avila, which remains open to the demands of truth and the promptings of the Holy Spirit? Or has our conscience become a mighty fortress built to prevent our encounter with truth?

Related reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nos. 1783-1785.

New Order Emerging: Preparation for the reign of Antichrist

Religious Preparation: Both Intellectual and Moral

(For the Reign of Antichrist):

"But how shall he deprive the world of Christianity and have himself adored as God? Alas, it is only too true that the minds and hearts of men are admirably disposed for revolution and consequently ready to accept and bear the cruel yoke of such a tyrant.

Revolution as the word itself implies means a subversion, but a subversion of all that is true, good, beautiful, and grand in the universe. It is the subversion of religion, representing its dogmas as myths and its moral teachings as tyranical. It is the subversion of authority. Licentiousness under the name of liberty becomes the order of the day; each one is invested with the right to govern himself.

It is the subversion of reason: and do we not find leading minds in some of the most enlightened nations denying the principle of contradiction and maintaining the absolute identity of all beings?

Revolution is therefore essentially destructive, and it becomes cosmopolitan by the action of secret societies scattered throughout the world. Is it not true to say that the 'mystery of iniquity' is prepared in secret revolutionary dens?

But it does not suffice to destroy; it is absolutely necessary to build up again. The world cannot subsist long in a vacuum. It must have a religion; it must have a philosophy; it must have an authority. Revolution will furnish all these.

Instead of the reasonable and supernatural religion of Jesus Christ, Revolution will preach Pantheism. The God-humanity will impart the theurgic spirit and thus lead men to adore the demon as the author of universal emancipation...

What frightful immorality must follow in the train of this shameless prostitution of religion! Never has the threefold concupiscence made greater ravage among mankind. And this is the religion sought and hoped for as the cherished boon of the aspirations of our modern free thinkers.

To our Christian philosophy, the honor of humanity's revolution will substitute a babel of extravagant and absurd ideas. Instead of a mild and efficient authority consecrated alike by Church and state, despotism* and anarchy will rise up and contend for the shreds of religious liberty and human policy...if the state of perversion continue for a while longer, he [Antichrist] will find the world prepared to receive and serve him." (Rev. P. Huchede, History of Antichrist, pp. 13-14, Tan Books).

Francis Cardinal George has already spoken of an emerging despotism while Cardinal Pell has warned that secularism is becoming totalitarian (see here). Meanwhile, some Catholics would have us believe that our present-day society is really no more evil than society was in days gone by (see the comments section of this post for example).

Related reading here and here.