March 2016
The Devil’s Delirium
THE EDITOR
And now war broke out in heaven, when Michael with his angels attacked the dragon. The dragon fought back with his angels, but they were defeated and driven out of heaven. The great dragon, the primeval serpent, known as the devil or Satan, who had deceived all the world, was hurled down to the earth and his angels were hurled down with him. ... Let the heavens rejoice and all who live there; but for you, earth and sea, trouble is coming — because the devil has gone down to you in a rage, knowing that his days are numbered. |
| - Apocalypse 12 : 7-12 |
Even our madness has gone mad, so that the man who has accepted the madness of Monday finds himself unforgivably sinning against the madness of Tuesday, as varieties of madness increase and multiply beyond the enumerative powers of the alphabet. |
| - Anthony Esolen |
There was a fleeting moment, not so very long ago, when we thought feminist agitation for women priests was about as crazy as it got — and would ever get. Christ the Transgendered Priest seemed to be the final word in absurdity. Indeed, in 1985, when he published his classic Women Priests and Other Fantasies, perhaps Father Vincent Miceli himself was beginning to wonder if we had reached the outer edge of the lunatic liberal spectrum.
Wrapped in a fabulous dust cover of an apple-brandishing Satan enticing a 20th-century daughter of Eve, his collection of essays on the state of the Church and the world was comprehensive, powerful, and prophetic. Not least apropos the violent societal ramifications of atheism and sodomy, about which he had long forewarned in graphic terms. A scholar for whom the signs of the times ticked all the scriptural boxes on the rise of Antichrist, nothing the Western bacchanal has vomited up since his death in 1991 would have wholly surprised him.
After all, sodomitic 'marriage,' designer-babies for sodomites and lesbians, the transformation of kindergartens into homo recruitment hubs, encouraging children to surgically swap their gender (if so inclined, without parental consent, at government expense, as in Oregon), forcing infants and teens to share toilets and change-rooms with 'transgender' classmates (as in California).... all these hellish developments are mere symptoms of the deep sickness in the soul of post-modern man. Fr Miceli described it as "a demonic reality similar to a hydra-headed serpent... a persistent, ever-increasing plague with many sources and causes: [above all] hatred of God's created order, and a refusal to serve Him."
The only constant in this rapid regression from bad to infinitely worse in the sociological blink of an eye, is the Luciferian bottom line he identified. In other words, the "demonic realities" we face today are simply deeper and darker symptoms of "Non serviam!"
Fomented since Adam by the whispering serpents of every age (the pagans, the heretics, the Lodge, the State, the media...), the reverberating echoes of this primal revolt trigger, always and everywhere: theological novelties, philosophical delusions, and, in consequence, the doctrinal and moral corruption that ushers in socio-political depravity.
During Fr Miceli's final years, the ontological inversion of the priesthood, by the witchy priestess crew and their ecclesiastical backers, was the pagan nadir du jour. Yet just as it momentarily stole the Pill's thunder against nature, the fantasy of double X-chromosome clerics gave way, in turn, to the present devilish constructs; the iron logic of atheism leading us to ever lower circles of Hell.
The War Against Being
For all his insight and foresight, however, even the great American Jesuit might have raised an eyebrow or two at our present pass. Not over the depths we have plumbed since the priestess push (for he knew we were, and remain, far from rock-bottom). Rather, over the lightning speed of the descent. The 'transgender'/'sex reassignment' blitzkrieg, for instance — a sudden vertiginous drop to unspeakable of levels of mass delusion.
On cue, The Danish Girl, Hollywood's latest "extraordinary true story" pushing vice as virtue, is about one of the first 'transgender surgeries' (in 1930). "This is not my body. I have to let it go," says the husband. "Fact is, I believe that I'm a woman." "So do I," replies the wife, elevating mental illness to an epiphany.
How quickly such risible exchanges have moved from Monty Python TV sketches where they belong, to big screen offerings that require patrons to check their funny bones in the PC cloak room — for fear of puncturing the solemn nonsense with peals of laughter, and sporting forever thereafter the white hot brands of 'bigotry' and 'intolerance.'
Yet social exclusion for puncturing PC balloons is the very least we must suffer to protect the innocent, who, as ever, are the primary targets of this unhinged social engineering. Already far advanced, its impact is paraded at every turn.
"Even mainstream entertainment channels such as TLC, widely watched by teenagers, have jumped on the transgender bandwagon," notes Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine [19/12/15]. Her 12-year-old daughter assures her: "'Transgender' is really trending right now, Mummy. You should watch I Am Jazz on TLC - everyone's really into it'." It turns out, says Vine, that "I Am Jazz is a transgender reality TV show about a 15-year-old American boy growing up as girl. ... Under close medical supervision, Jazz is undergoing therapy to block her male hormones.... At the same time, she takes oestrogen to help her body look more feminine." Worst of all, yet per usual, "Her parents, who seem like nice, ordinary middle-class people, are fully behind her."
This is the pattern established ever since the corporate-likes of Planned Parenthood, seeking to create a market for contraception and back-up abortion-on-demand, successfully lobbied the educational establishment for explicit classroom sex-ed. Authority figures at every level of society continue to lead this corruption of children.
The Sun recently featured a front page photo of two six-year old cousins, one of whom, we are told, has morphed from "Max" to "Mia." Doubtless the little mite will soon be shot full of hormones to 'turn him into' something he is not. Like "Jazz," betrayed in the first instance by his sadly misled and complicit parents, Max doesn't stand a chance of a normal life in a country whose public authorities, under a supposed conservative government, push a 'diversity' agenda that includes asking children to define their own gender. Damian Thompson has reported on this official lunacy:
Try to imagine a world populated by teenagers who are neither boys nor girls but have three genders at once: they are male, female and androgynous, making them 'tri-gender'.
Other young people are known as ‘demi-boys’ and 'demi-girls'. Some drift between genders in a variety of ways. Some are 'bi-gender'; still more are 'trans-girls' and 'trans-boys', while yet another tribe identify themselves as 'gender fluid'.
This sounds like the stuff of science fiction. In fact, every term I’ve just used comes from a questionnaire that the British Government planned to submit to children aged 13 to 18 as part of a research project sponsored by the Department of Education via the £2.9 million-a-year office of the Children’s Commissioner for England. [Daily Telegraph, 29/1/16]
The questionnaire also asks children whether they feel safe using single-sex toilets, or would prefer unisex ones.
In our wildest imagination we'd be hard-pressed to make up any of this. But we don't need to. It's all unfolding before our very eyes. Thompson continued:
A spokesman said it [the questionnaire] was a draft, that the Commissioner had not cleared it and that a new version will be prepared with some of the questions withdrawn.
Too late. Some schools have already received the questionnaire, and details of the planned research project have been published by the feminist academics from Brighton, Lancaster and Cardiff universities who have been working on it with University College London’s Institute of Education since May last year.
Nearly every sentence of the documents in which those academics stress the importance of this research is clogged with the jargon of hardline feminists and their allies in the 'trans' lobby.
Ah yes, the ubiquitous sisterhood and its manic war against being. Like the poor, the feminists are always with us: forever pushing gender as a social construct. Although they failed to bully the Church into presenting Christ the High Priest as a woman, their persistent hectoring paved the way for a feminist pontiff who undermines the male priesthood by washing female feet on Holy Thursday. Buoyed by such incremental rewards, they pursue their Daliesque mission to reinvent reality with Marxist fervour.
Delusion and Dysfunction
As ever, effective control of education policy is their platform to concretise the unthinkable; to form a new generation in their self-absorbed image and crackpot likeness.
In January, Brighton College changed its 170-year-old uniform code to accommodate children with 'gender dysphoria' (kids who've convinced themselves they were born the wrong sex). So boys identifying as girls can now wear a skirt, a bolero jacket and an open-neck blouse up to the age of 16. While girls identifying as boys can wear a tweed blazer, a tie and trousers.
It took only a handful of familial requests from among the 900-strong student body, and discussions with the school's "gender society" (?!), to sway the ready-and-willing headmaster, Richard Cairns. As if speaking on behalf of the touchy-feely teaching establishment, he explained this Pythonesque free-for-all as follows:
It ties in with my strong personal belief that youngsters should be respected for who they are. If some boys and girls are happier identifying with a different gender from that in which they were born, then my job is to make sure that we accommodate that. My one interest is their welfare and happiness.
Of course, if he were genuinely concerned about "their welfare and happiness," Mr Cairns would have dutifully researched the matter, discovered the tragic life that awaits children encouraged to tread this ghastly path (as explained in our October 2014 edition and again herein by Dr. McHugh), and determined to protect rather than abandon them.
Yet his dereliction is widely admired and encouraged by equally deluded peers. Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the University of Birmingham, said: "This is a sensitive area, obviously, but the lead given by Richard Cairns seems both compassionate and enlightened as it is giving his students the freedom to choose. He is being truly innovative."
Like the euphoric response of Irish youth to the 'gay marriage' referendum victory, the response of Brighton College pupils speaks to the ominous impact of this 'innovation': to the anarchic spirit and worldview deeply instilled in the coming generations, as if in preparation for Antichrist.
"I am really proud that I have been educated in a school where there is no concept of the norm, of conformity and of the expected way to be," said sixth-former Fred Dimbleby — son of BBC broadcaster David Dimbleby. His fellow sixth-former Amy Arnell concurred: "There really is no negativity towards this new policy at school. When the headmaster announced it no one was really surprised. There is just no reason not to do it, if it makes people feel more comfortable about themselves." Naturally, Fred thought "it would be great if all of schools took up this idea."
The Frankfurt School Effect
If not all schools do so, it will not be for want of aggressive effort. "The sheer dominance of the transgender narrative in the media, and the aggression directed at anyone who exhibits the merest twitch of a quizzical eyebrow is astonishing," writes Sarah Vine. "Raise even the slightest moral, ethical or sociological question about this issue, and you might as well be saying Hitler wasn't such a bad chap at all."
As she goes on to say, the majority opinion is simply "drowned out by the kind of cultural fascism that prides itself on standing up for minority interests while at the same time denying many others their right to expression." She decries this faux tolerance as "a one-way street in favour of those who shout the loudest."
In other words, to paraphrase the cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse: 'No tolerance for the intolerant right [read Christians], but tolerance for the progressive left [read atheists]'. Feminism and other movements of deconstruction (of Christian civilisation), owe much to this illiberal liberalism that Marcuse and his anti-Christian Frankfurt School colleagues planted in Western academia, media, and all the formative institutions of the West.
The effects have long been manifest in our dissolute culture of death. That it has now rapidly escalated to a full-blown societal psychosis accepting of sci-fi absurdities, like men 'marrying' men and determining one's own gender, should not overly surprise us.
Served up 24/7 on techno-gadgetry, hearts and minds are now wired for the 'new reality.' It's an asylum out there! "When you see things like transgender people demanding the right to go in the bathroom of the opposite gender — and not just asking politely, but then suing when a city rejects them through referendum," railed US pundit David Limbaugh, "this is nonsense, this is insanity."
Dr. McHugh and Melanie Phillips summarise the rational response to the latest 'transgender'-phase of this suicidal path; a process dictated by leftist lobbies with political influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Indefatigable, they are now at work in Poland, trying to bludgeon the final frontier of Christian sanity into their Western madhouse. The good news, though, is that they have suddenly met their match.
For many years a corrupt ruling class of unreconstructed Communists and liberal-left fellow travellers had been happily obliging the "equality"/"rights"/"anti-discrimination" mob. The tables were providentially turned, however, when the Poles recently voted in the political antidote to the sort of Frankfurt School bedlam promoted by the Feminoteka Foundation: whose "Equality in Nursery Schools" project encourages Polish pre-school children to act and dress up in clothes of the opposite sex. The newly elected Law and Justice Party will send these perverts packing; just as they are standing firm before a furious European elite, and their media lackeys left and right, all desperate to misrepresent and derail a righteous Polish programme of democratic restoration and PC-obliteration. (A counter-revolution based on principled government and patriotism, we hope to run some corrective interviews on that score in forthcoming editions.)
Modernist Mayhem
Meantime, in addition to the Western socio-political nightmare without, we continue to endure ecclesiastical madness within.
Where to start?! It is nigh impossible to keep track of the daily outrages committed by pope, prelates and priests, any one of which calls into question the spiritual and mental health of the current hierarchical body. Sometimes, for those paying attention, it's the little things that telegraph our fearful predicament. Like the notorious Irish apostate who wants to educate us about the new theology of "integral ecology" through "a three year synod on Laudato Si"! The telltale sign is not the risible suggestion itself but the fact that it is perfectly possible, since this priest, Fr Sean McDonagh, contributed to writing the encyclical.
Not crazy enough? How about another Laudato Si collaborator, Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández, the pope's ghost writer, who has written a book called Heal Me With Your Mouth, The Art of Kissing(1995). Too preposterous? During an interview, His Grace explained the motivation and methodology behind this vital contribution to evangelisation and the salvation of souls:
I want to clarify that this book is not written from my own experience, but from the lives of people kissing. In these pages I want to synthesize the popular feeling, what people feel when they think of a kiss, what they experienced when they kiss. For that I chatted at length with many people who have abundant experience in this area, and also with many young people learn to kiss. In addition, I consulted many books, and I wanted to show how the poets talk about the kiss. So, I tried to synthesize the immense richness of life, these pages, out of the kiss. I hope they help you kiss better, and motivate you to release the best of your being in a kiss.
As well as penning the Laudato Si Si, No No abomination, this diabolically disoriented soul wrote Evangelii Gaudium.
Towering above this pandemic of deranged episodes (which go largely unremarked in the 'Catholic' press), is the headline derangement. In one way or another, we have been reporting it for three long years this month. Herewith a few lowlights:
Who will ever forget the vindictive jack-boot assault on the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Immaculate.
Or Mgr Ricca, the former nuncio who lived openly with his Swiss 'boyfriend' at the Uruguayan nunciature, engaging in homo-promiscuity that often brought him to scandalous grief, yet was appointed by Francis as both his personal representative at the Vatican bank, and director of the papal toy residence at Casa Santa Marta.
Then there was the pederast bishop in Chile whose consecration went ahead despite local outrage that finally, inevitably, erupted in a furious riot within the cathedral.
Also those German prelates beloved of Francis and so influential despite their manifest apostasy: pro-sodomite, pro-divorce bishops at once spiritually dead and materially sated; whose individual annual stipends could support entire African nations. Not to forget their Austrian cousin, Cardinal Schönborn, whose manifold delusions included fulsome praise of a singing transvestite (a mentally ill bearded man), while insisting that "Not everyone who was born a man identifies as such."
The Francis Effect
It may be hard to tell where papal, episcopal, and priestly self-serving ends and irrationality begins. Yet ecclesiastics claiming to be Catholic, while continually denying, in fact or in effect, what it is that makes them one, is surely a definition of insanity.
The trickle-down effect has seen the clerical dementia reflected in the pews. As an example of the workaday state of play in the parishes of the West, take one 'Tara' Hewitt. Recently pictured in the Liverpool Echo with the local bishop during his Easter 2015 reception into the Church, 'Tara' is a pansexual equality and diversity advisor who presents himself as both a 'woman' and a 'Catholic.' It's hard to know which of those self-deceptions is sadder, or more offensive, ludicrous and irrational.
Suffice to say he's a cafeteria-'Catholic' on steroids (pun more-or-less intended).
"God isn't male or female, they are both," he pontificates, before depicting himself as a hard done by conservative! "It’s hard being right wing and trans," he laments in his stockings and makeup. He actually stood as a Tory candidate at the last election until the press exposed his sexual fetishes: having reportedly described himself as an "advocate of the BDSM (bondage, discipline and sadomasochism) community," and into "swinging" and "pet play" (dressing up as an animal for sex). How to reconcile all that with his newfound faith? Not a delusory problem. "None of my views are based on sexual orientation. I support love," he says.
Sounding all the world like a certain pontiff, he repeats that it's all about "love, mercy and forgiveness not my image," since the relationship between the individual and the Church is private and his understanding of his faith should not, therefore, impact anybody else. On which basis we may as well rip up the Gospels and feed "teach ye all nations" through the shredder!
'Tara' says it all. Beyond Vatican City and the two-pope craziness, this is the madness on the ground: where uncatechised blokes in skirts mimic Francis, as they tread the broad way to destruction with episcopal blessing.
Three Steps to the Atheistic Asylum
Yes indeed, the rate of demonic descent has doubled and trebled since Fr Miceli's demise. Yet even the breathtaking speed at which Dionysian fantasies are now being mainstreamed may not have disturbed him as much as this equally breathless surge of episcopal complicity — personified by the prelate who welcomed 'Tara' into the church in his girly confirmation outfit. Having thus trashed the theological virtues, he compounded his abuse of 'Tara' by letting him loose without a catechetical clue, or a truly loving and merciful referral for psychiatric assistance.
Long rampant but momentarily checked under Benedict, the complicity is now so shameless because they all feel free to parade their collegial apostasy under his successor — a more zealous graduate of the same neo-Modernist school that leads inexorably to the denial of all religion. "The first step in this direction was taken by Protestantism; the second is made by Modernism; the next will plunge headlong into atheism," warned St. Pius X in Pascendi.
Revolutionary Age of Unreason
As we have noted many times, Pascendi joins dots with a Thomistic precision and logic antithetical to the contradictory, scattergun Bergoglian papacy. The pressing question is how that imprecision will manifest itself in the forthcoming post-synod Apostolic Exhortation?
Many believe Francis could call natural law into question (pastorally, of course). La Stampa reported the ominous forecast of Cardinal Paglia, President of the Pontifical Council on the Family, who believes "the Exhortation will be an ode to love, the kind of love that cares for the wellbeing of children and that is able to be close to wounded families." After this open-ended 'who am I to judge?' pap — which dovetails with the new non-judgemental marriage annulment procedures (guaranteed to wound children and families) — His Eminence concluded portentously: "The challenge... is to stand by families without putting labels on people. We must always see the positive side of every family and help it to grow."
Growth? Towards what?
Catholic sanity and salvation?
Or hetero/homo/bi/demi/quasi/trans-androgyny?
Bishop Catellani of Lucca, for one, opts for the latter, insisting "the time has come for Christians to open up to the new paradigm... that every diversity is richness."
Effectively spelling out the unstated revolutionary designs of the Pope, Cardinal Paglia, Bishop Catellani, et. al., lesbian lawyer Paula Ettelbrick proclaimed that it was all about "transforming the very fabric of society, ... radically reordering society’s view of reality."
Clearly, we have reached this apocalyptic Age of Unreason — this convergent storm in Church and State — because Christ, Reason Himself, has been dethroned. Abnormality is the new normal, and the sovereign Self is king.
These are the 21st-century fruits of "the new era inaugurated in 1789" that so fascinated Cardinal Ratzinger. Note well the Modernistic dissembling at play: the choice of "new" instead of "revolutionary" to describe the "era" "inaugurated" by Satan's spawn: the Lodge!
Obviously, such precise qualifiers did not fit well with his call for "an official reconciliation" with that malign epoch. For to reconcile, even circumspectly, with the Masonic artifice we call 'modernity,' is to sell out Christ the King; towave the white flag of accommodation with the world, the flesh, and the devil; to buy into a Revolutionary status quo steeped in irrationality and mendacity.
Even atheist Michel Foucault, the late philosophical guru of deconstruction and irreality, understood that Reason is of God; Delirium of the Devil. "Foucault became fascinated with madness and its treatment," explains E. Michael Jones, "convinced that the only reason anyone became ‘tenants of the madhouse’ was because their sins of ‘unreason’ brought them there." "Madness fascinates," wrote Foucault, "because it is knowledge." But it was useful knowledge. Because madness was the opposite of Logos, it could be used to overturn the social order. Madness could bring about the reign of Satan "because it is forbidden knowledge, [and so] it anticipates at the same time the reign of Satan, and the end of the world, the final bliss and the ultimate punishment; the almighty power on earth and the infernal downfall.." For Foucault, neither God nor the Devil triumph, since, in the end, "Victory ... belongs to madness."
Ergo, madness is revolutionary. An insight tailored for a world on the brink: steeped in self-delusion, suffocated by lies, dying in its sins. American writer Anthony Esolen captured the chaos in his article "Unreal Nation" [Crisis, 17/9/15]:
In my nation we deny truths that lie in front of our eyes. Any fool can figure out that a man is not a woman, a cesspool is not a womb, a drug that thwarts the natural action of an organ is not medicine, an orphan is not a privileged member of an alternative family, pictures of people doing vile things are not the same as speech, and a law whose substance no one can know (because it is too vast, or vague, or incomprehensible) or rely upon (because it is subject to the caprice of inventive judges) is not a law at all. Any fool; but we are not any fool, just as Michelangelo was not any artist. We have judges who legislate, legislators who defer to bureaucrats and judges, and executives who do what they will.
We have "Boy" Scout leaders who don’t know the meaning of the word "boy," we have physicians helping people kill themselves, we have priests turned atheists as did Eli’s sons, we have a Common Core [curriculum] of emptiness; even our madness has gone mad, so that the man who has accepted the madness of Monday finds himself unforgivably sinning against the madness of Tuesday, as varieties of madness increase and multiply beyond the enumerative powers of the alphabet.
All to be expected. Lies disintegrate. Shall we believe the lies? I can call poison sweet, but it will still kill me. I can call sand bedrock, but it will not stand (Matt. 7:24-27)
Legislating Irreality: Outlawing Christianity
The Bergoglian Revolution, embodied in his Sodomy/Adultery Synod (or 'Synod on the Diversification of the Family', as he would doubtless prefer), is a subset of this broader Permanent Revolution of Endless Change. Built on shifting sand instead of the rock of the Word, it has finally legislated irreality onto the statute books, all but proscribing Christianity in the process. In his dissenting minority opinion against the US Supreme Court majority that struck down one part of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, the late (Catholic) Justice Antonin Scalia spoke to the hostile imposition of unreason in effecting perpetual 'change':
[T]he majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malice … to disparage and to injure same-sex couples. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to 'disparage,' 'injure,' 'degrade,' 'demean,' and 'humiliate' our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual... It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.
It all boiled down to an arbitrary decision that homosexual acts are not sinful; they are normal and acceptable. As one blogger summarised at the time, the Supreme Court effectively ruled:
1. Christianity is false: it teaches homosexual acts are a perversion of sex; but we know they are healthy and good for those who prefer to do them.
2. Christianity is immoral: it teaches that people who commit homosexual acts are sinning; but we know they are sinning by disparaging homosexual acts and, by extension, those who like to participate in them.
3. Christianity is socially destructive: it teaches that good people should discourage homosexual acts for the sake of everyone, especially those tempted to them; and we know that such judgments are oppressive of a minority and therefore anti-social.
Even our zeitgeist-friendly pontiff has failed to arrest this burgeoning hatred. Why? Because Marcusian 'dialogue' is a one-way street of endless concessions. Any disapproval of deviancy, however mildly and mercifully expressed, is unacceptable. The 'transgender' onslaught shows they are not for turning. Never have been. Never will be. Where satanic 'useful idiots' are concerned — whether the criminally perverse or amoral judges who legitimate them — enough compromise is never enough.
Far from pandering to them, we must dutifully push them back into the swamp and out of harm's way, by every prayerful, sacramental, socio-political means available. For their lusts and consequent blind hatred will not be satiated until the Holy Gospels are criminalised; the priests and followers of Jesus Christ driven from the public square.
Surviving the Enemy!
As legislated depravity fuels the legal persecution of Christian objectors, endtime-queries inevitably arise: Is the current lunacy a mere platform for what's to come? Having sown the wind of practical atheism, could Satan reap a final whirlwind even worse — far worse — than today's politically-correct dementia?
Both Holy Scripture and experience answer in the affirmative. In The Anti-Christ, Fr. Vincent Miceli related the prophecies of the Antichrist and applied them to history, including the major disasters of our times. Thirty years before Francis gave new meaning to the ecclesiastical "reconciliation" with the revolution "inaugurated" by the Masons, the scholarly Jesuit showed how the great apostasy forewarned by the Mother of God at La Salette and contained in the Third Secret of Fatima, had set in train the possibility of the worldwide collapse of Catholicism. A dozen years after his death in 1991, a review of the work noted how
He held nothing back in painting a harsh, realistic picture of the current state of the world. Showing how the failure of authority and the abandonment of the moral fabric and Church doctrine was widening the portal for the Antichrist to come forth. ... He studies many of the false prophets in history and showed how satan can throw off even the elect. He identified the precursors to the Antichrist, and revealed the portents of the coming climax of evil which will be incarnated in the person of the false Messiah who will be the Antichrist. Father illustrated how the presence of mini-Antichrists within the Church have been working as demolition squads with animus delendi — the desire to destroy — the Mystical Body of Christ. Were it not for Our Lord's promise in Matthew 16:19, this would be even more frightening for what lay ahead, as Father could foresee, is hell itself on earth. Only those with heroic virtue will be able to survive the enemy.
Famously identified by St. Paul in Ephesians, "the enemy" consists of "principalities and powers,... the rulers of the world of this darkness,... the spirits of wickedness in the high places." The Douay-Rheims duly clarifies that "high places" means "in the air, the lowest of the celestial regions; in which God permits these wicked spirits or fallen angels to wander." And wander they do: sowing the devil's delirium as enlightened thought and progress.
There is only one response: the exhortation we know by heart! "Take unto you the armour of God," cries St. Paul,
that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect./ Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice,/And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace:/In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one./And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God). [Eph. 6: 13-17]
As recounted last month, St. Anthony of Egypt lived out this call to the letter: both in hermitic solitude and among men. His deep interior life inspired his external mission: to stay informed; to denounce error; to support the faithful; to rebuke the persecutors of Holy Church; to preach the Truth, Love, Grace and Mercy of Jesus Christ — all in a prayerful spirit of peace and joy.
Like Anthony, therefore, let us cultivate interiority as our sword and shield: so that we, too, may "resist", with strength and serenity, the devilish prince of this delirious world, and proclaim more joyously still, the Resurrection of the Prince of Peace, and the life of the real world (of heavenly peace and sanity) to come.