Renew The Church! – website and Blog

God gave us what used to be called common sense.  That natural gift of reason, common sense, used to be – well – common.  It was usual; it was presumed present in people educated and uneducated.  It was a foundation of our legal system, because it was based on the age-old “natural moral law” – a universal sense of right and wrong found in cultures around the world – a moral sense that we Christians understand to be placed in the human conscience of all men and women by God.  Common sense today seems to be vaporizing, turning to a wisp of smoke, scattered to the winds, and it’s gone .

A universal moral law, set in humanity by God, is a serious “inconvenience” for men who want what they want when they want it.  “Common sense” in the moral realm, in a word, condemns much that modern man lusts for.  And thus, inventive that he is, modern man has come up with a replacement standard for human behavior.  Out with common sense; out with the natural moral law; and in with ”political correctness.”  Political correctness has all the qualities needed for rules of social behavior that fit with the lusts of modern man.  Political correctness as a standard meets with the approval of so many because it is so malleable.  It is adjustable.  It can be made into what modern man wants, to justify modern man grabbing and taking whatever his lustful heart desires.  The power of political correctness is the power of numbers – the power of popular opinions, even fads, and as enduring.  Political correctness is not unlike mob rule – and just as dangerous.

A modern example is contraception – a solution to a problem: how to keep sexual pleasure but avoid the pesky problem of potential children.  For many modern men (men and women),  children are all right at a distance, and in moderation, as long as they are someone else’s responsibility.  For many modern men sexual pleasure is good, but responsibility for children is bad, and costly, taking precious money away from toys and fun needing it instead to raise children, a very costly side-effect of sexual pleasure.  This used to be a problem, until modern contraceptives came to modern men.

Contraception used to be a sin!  Virtually all Christians used to hold and teach that contraception was a moral evil, until the Lambeth Conference of Anglicans in 1930.  There, and then,  Anglican Churches approved contraception for married couples, for “morally sound reason.”  The Conference records a guarded permission, but maintained “strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”  Such reservation did not last long.  Contraception is now completely disassociated from marriage – marriage is incidental to the sexual freedom of modern man.  Now contraception is available and distributed in public schools, and is widely considered now to be a human right to be funded at taxpayer expense.  So much for the history of human logic and reason prior to 1930, and the previous wide-spread Christian condemnation of contraception as a violation of reason and the natural moral law.  God created human sexuality intrinsically linked to human procreation, for a reason!  But reason was brushed aside, theology was “modified”, and contraception became a public good and a human right. Its use spread like wildfire especially with the “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” explosion of the 1960’s and 70’s.

A way to artificially break apart at will what God had joined together (sexual pleasure and babies), quickly expanded the horizons of man’s pseudo-freedom from personal responsibility, to include a “plan B” to exclude unwanted babies: abortion.  This too was once a public horror, even a public crime, as well as a moral travesty!  But mob morality shouted loud and long enough, and the forces of “political correctness” began to bless and not condemn it.  Ways were found to speak well of the need to kill the unwanted child in the womb: “women’s rights” and “freedom of choice” were louder than the silent voices in the womb, and the previous “right to life” of the human person yet unborn.  Reason is brushed aside, common sense and the natural moral law is shouted down, denied and rejected: the crowd has its way.  Political correctness makes its own morality, a house of cards, built on sand.  It is the inculturation of insanity, protected not by moral law and the power of truth, but by mere law and the power of numbers: “might makes right.”  A post-Christian era was dawning upon us, and moral blindness was spreading through the land.  A culture of death was being born, a seed of satan, the father of lies, the enemy of reason and of all that is true.

When a culture embraces the lie, and rejects reason and moral truth, great suffering is in store.  So many examples come to mind: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, countless other reigns of dictators and despots with horrific blood trails across the continents of the world.  America has been flirting with an evil more dangerous than she can imagine; she knows not what is on the coming horizon.

The insanity here, nevertheless, and the drunken “advances” continue.  Why stop with worry-free sex for only heterosexual couples?  Let’s champion the full equivalence of homosexual preferences as well!  They’ve had baby-free sex the whole time!  It makes perfect sense, in the insanity of political correctness, that “freedom of choice” applies to them as well. Full homosexual equivalence certainly must include same-sex marriage, and adoption rights, and why not polygamy and group-marriage as well?  Three men and two women all “married” in one group “family?  Why not?  Who is to say anything is wrong with any combination or permutation that we want, or think of?  We make the rules.  We define normalcy.  We are gods.

And why stop with the unnatural and inherently sterile sexuality of a same-sex couple?  Suppose the man really wants to be a woman instead?  What if a surgeon can turn his sex organs inside-out, pump woman-hormones into him, implant water bags in his chest, and make him look sort of like a woman?  Sure!  Why not?  If it can be done, why not?  Or if a woman can have her body surgically refashioned into her inner man-image, why not?  It’s not as though God or somebody made her a woman for a reason, is it?  She is merely a moment – an accident of the cosmos – and it’s her life to live as she chooses.

But suppose the man doesn’t want to have an operation.  Suppose he just feels like he is a woman, notwithstanding all the anatomical evidence to the contrary, and he feels like using the women’s bathrooms and showers at the public pool.  Doesn’t he have the right, as a poor victim of old-fashioned puritanical morality that is prejudiced against him and hurts his feelings, to do as he pleases and walk right in?  But of course!  Let’s firm this up, and make it his legal right, his human right, to be “normal” as he chooses to define “normal” today.  Innocent little girls in that public restroom ought to be trained at home – or better, at public school – to just ignore him when he comes in.  It’s so important to be tolerant!  America has gone mad.  She is insane.

Would that this were all a nightmare, and we would soon wake up and realize that we were all  sleeping, and none of this was real.  It is a nightmare!  None of it is real.  But it is happening, nevertheless.  It really is happening here, in a once-Christian America, in a country and a culture that was recently, in Ronald Reagan’s vision, a “shining light on the hill” for the whole world.  How we need such leadership, such vision in these darkening days.

Friends, somehow the fence around sanity got inverted: inside got out, and outside got in.  Our culture has gone insane, and normal is now sick, and this inversion of moral truth has come upon us in my lifetime.  I saw it come, and I still can’t believe my own eyes.

Is it too late?  Will America simply collapse into itself, one more decadent self-obsessed and hedonistic culture falls – so typical in the history of mankind.  Is there no happy ending for us in this world?  The spirit at work for human destruction has made great strides “forward”, in his distorted quest for death.  Will he succeed?  Will he quench the light and life in this country completely?

Another name for “post-Christian” to describe our culture, is “neo-pagan.”  We are regressing, friends, not advancing, and we need to stop and reverse course while there is still time to do so.  Who will lead us?  Where are the leaders who can see where we ought to be, and what direction we ought to take, and what we need to do to get there?  That leadership, that vision, that prudence and wisdom, is in the Church – within her “soul,” the divine Holy Spirit.

But where is the Church?  Where is the Catholic Church in America?  Jesus Christ poured His Holy Spirit into His chosen Church, and sent her to be light, and to be life, among men walking in the shadow of the death of this world!  He overcame evil; He overcame death; He showed us the way and the truth and the life!  Where are we – and where is His Church, His own, His chosen?

The Church is mostly asleep, content with platitudes and niceness, while savages around the world are aiming their hatred straight at us.  Here is where conversion must begin: in our parishes, and chanceries, and convents and monasteries: conversion must begin within, deep within the heart of the Church, so that she, awakened and alive and renewed in zeal, might begin to live her mission.  The world needs the life of Christ!  The Church needs to awaken, and soon.

What a miracle it would be, if the fervent prayers of a few could call down heavenly showers of saving grace to rain upon us!  What glorious joy would come to those in the shadow of death, if Christians standing before Christ, our Lord, would fall to their faces in shame and repentance – yet in hope – and cry out for His mercy on us all!  Save us, Lord; save us all from this suicidal drive in the sick heart of fallen humanity, this insanity, this evil thirst of the evil one in the last throes of his own destruction.