Rejecting the Crucifix as offensive: Preparation for the Reign of Antichrist

When one of the world's leading exorcists, Father Gabriele Amorth, was asked how one can tell if someone is possessed, he replied, "By their aversion to the sacrament and all things sacred." One of the clearest signs of demonic possession is a hatred for the Eucharist or the crucifix.  Back in December of 2009, little Jalen Cromwell of Taunton, Massachusetts, was forced to undergo psychological evaluations for drawing a stick figure of the crucified Jesus.  See here.  And electrician Colin Atkinson's palm cross was deemed "insensitive."  See here.  As noted here, "..David Cameron's government will insist at the European Court of Human Rights that Christians can be sacked by their employers for wearing crosses or crucifixes."  And remember when the White House asked Georgetown University to cover the IHS monogram (a symbol of Jesus' holy name) at Gaston Hall where Obama was scheduled to deliver a speech?  See here.

There are numerous other examples of this growing hostility toward the cross or the crucifix.  In his treatise on ascetical and mystical theology, The Very Reverend Adolphe Tanquerey, S.S., D.D., explains that, "The Sacramentals and blessed objects are also efficacious remedies [for possession and diabolical temptation] because of the prayers said by the Church when blessing them...The Crucifix, the Sign of the Cross, and especially genuine relics of the True Cross are terrifying to the devil who was vanquished by the Cross: 'That the one who conquered by a tree should himself be likewise conquered by the Tree.'  For the same reason the Evil Spirit dreads the invocation of the Holy Name of Jesus, which, on the Master's Own promise, possesses a wondrous power for putting the devil to flight." (The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, p. 724, citing the Preface for the Feast of the Holy Cross, Tan Books).

 Antichrist will reveal himself within the context of an atheistic, materialistic society which has lost its faith in God and which is prepared to fall down and worship man.  The Antichrist will not tolerate the Cross or Christian symbols.  In his Life of Christ (Image Books, 1977, p. 10), Archbishop Fulton John Sheen wrote, "We do know that at the end of time, when the great conflict between the forces of good and evil takes place, Satan will appear without the Cross, as the Great Philanthropist and Social Reformer to become the final temptation of mankind." Indeed, Paul Henri-Spaak, who served as Belgian Prime Minister and gained international prominence in 1945 when he was elected chairman of the first session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, had called for such a "Great Philanthropist and Social Reformer": "We do not want another committee, we have too many already. What we want is a man of sufficient stature to hold the allegiance of all people, and to lift us out of the economic morass in which we are sinking. Send us such a man and be he God or the Devil, we will receive him."

Saint Paul assures us that this man of iniquity will seek to displace God and to be worshipped himself.  Robert Hugh Benson, in his classic The Lord of the World (a most prophetic work) describes the humanitarian religion of Antichrist as one which will replace Christian symbols such as the Crucifix with its own symbols: "Humanitarianism is a religion devoid of the supernatural.  It is developing a ritual under freemasonry; it has a creed, 'God is man'; and the rest.  It has, therefore, a real food of a sort to offer religious cravings: it idealizes, and yet makes no demands upon the spiritual faculties.  Then, they have the use of all the churches except ours, and of all the Cathedrals; and they are beginning at last to encourage sentiment.  Then they may display their symbols and we may not..."

Symbols are powerful because they convey meaning.  Which is why we are experiencing a push to strip Christian symbols from the public square.  While Colin Atkinson came under fire for his palm cross and Jalen Cromwell was forced to undergo psychological evaluations because of his hand-drawn Crucifix, Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," which depicts a Crucifix submerged in a glass of Serrano's own urine mixed with cow's blood, is considered by some to be a "work of art" and received $15,000 from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts.  Serrano's supporters have argued that the "Piss Christ" represents an issue of artistic freedom and freedom of speech.

And while the Obama White House asked for the IHS monogram to be covered up at Georgetown (a request which was honored), the same Obama White House had no such problem with a Masonic symbol - see photograph.

"Is there not a vigorous and united movement in all countries to cast down the Church of Christ from power and place?"

Cardinal John Henry Newman was a prophet. He saw the foundations being laid for apostasy in his own time. He was able to see the signs of sickness within the Body of Christ as surely as a physician today is able to detect a cancer in the human body. In a sermon dealing with the times of Antichrist delivered more than a century ago, his Eminence asked, "And is there no reason to fear that some such Apostasy is gradually preparing, gathering, hastening on in this very day? For is there not at this very time a special effort made almost all over the world, that is, every here and there, more or less, in sight or out of sight, in this or that place, but most visibly or formidably in its most civilized and powerful parts, an effort to do without religion? Is there not an opinion avowed and growing, that a nation has nothing to do with religion; that it is merely a matter for each man's own conscience,-which is all one with saying that we may let the truth fail from the earth without trying to continue it? Is there not a vigorous and united movement in all countries to cast down the Church of Christ from power and place? Is there not a feverish and ever busy endeavour to get rid of the necessity of religion in public transactions? for example, an attempt to get rid of oaths, under a pretence that they are too sacred for affairs of common life, instead of providing that they be taken more reverently and more suitably? an attempt to educate without religion,-that is, by putting all forms of religion together, which comes to the same thing? an attempt to enforce temperance, and the virtues which flow from it, without religion, by means of societies which are built on mere principles of utility? an attempt to make expedience, and not truth the end and the rule of measures of state and the enactments of law an attempt to make numbers, and not truth, the ground of maintaining, or not maintaining this or that creed, as if we had any reason whatever in Scripture for thinking that the many will be in the right, and the few in the wrong? An attempt to deprive the Bible of its one meaning to the exclusion of others, to make people think that it may have a hundred meanings all equally good, or in other words, that it has no meaning at all, is a dead letter, and may be put aside? an attempt to supersede religion altogether, as far as it is external or objective, as far as it is displayed in ordinances, or can be expressed by written words,-to confine it to our inward feelings, and thus, considering how transient, how variable, how evanescent our feelings are, an attempt in fact, to destroy religion?


Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general apostasy from it. Whether this very apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, we cannot know; but at any rate this apostasy, and all its tokens, and instruments, are of the Evil One and saviour of death. Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison! Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination,-he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

Man is being conditioned to worship himself. The crisis of faith is a crisis of the supernatural. Once this crisis of faith has reached its zenith, once men have deified themselves, the one whom St. Paul calls "the man of iniquity" will reveal himself to the world. For he can only reveal himself within the context of apostasy, loss of faith - open rebellion against God. Until then he is restrained.

Dostoyevsly makes this point in The Brothers Karamazov:

"Once humanity to a man renounces God (and I believe that period, analogous with the geological periods, will come to pass) the old outlook on life will collapse by itself without cannibalism and, above all, the old morality too, and a new era will dawn. Men will unite to get everything life can give, but only for joy and happiness in this world alone. Man will be exalted with a spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will make his appearance. Extending his conquest over nature infinitely every hour by his will and science, man will every hour by that very fact feel so lofty a joy that it will make up for his old hopes of the joys of heaven..."

Related reading here and here.

A dying civilization

In 1926 Oswald Spengler, in his classic work entitled "Decline Of The West," issued a salutary warning to the Western nations and a diagnosis of the disease which was beginning to slowly destroy them like a cancer:

"You are dying. I see in you all the characteristics stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great povety, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains - can prove to you that these were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states - Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome."

One of the most significant signs of this decay is the fact that homosexuality and lesbianism are both on the increase and this perverse "lifestyle" is being redefined as a simple variant of normal sexuality while unjust laws are attempting to legitimize same-sex "marriage." Even some Catholics are in support of such "laws," which really are not laws but acts of violence which harm the common good. It was Dr. Abram Kardiner who warned that homosexuality reaches pestilential and plague proportions in morally rotting societies during the final stages of total collapse.

America, and the other Western nations, have forgotten this profound truth:

"Whoever strikes against God strikes down himself. The atheist denying God degrades himself. The atheist exalting himself above God sinks below the level of animate and inanimate beings. Liberation from God is enslavement in creatures. Absolute humanism is the sure road to absolute despotism. Denial of God as truth begets the imprisonment of man in the self-imposed darkness of his own myths...We will only profoundly appreciate the satanic nature of atheism when we realize that denial of God is not merely an indifferent Nay-saying to God, but a kind of blasphemous joy at hating God and a thrilling decision to unite men in a community of enduring hate for the purpose of banishing God from the hearts of men." (Father Vincent P. Miceli, S.J., The Gods of Atheism, p. 461).

America will only survive if it returns to the Living God. Apart from Him there is only enslavement. An enslavement here on earth which will continue throughout eternity in hell. For that is what hell is: self-will, eternal despair.

Related reading here and here.