Renew The Church! – website and Blog

The precarious circumstance of Western culture today ought to be painfully evident to anyone with eyes to see. Yes there are pockets of resistance, but the expansive culture- and nation-wide denial of the natural moral law is astounding. For me, it is literally incredible. Almost everything inside of me is insisting that no, this cannot be happening. It cannot be “normal” for parents to approve of – enable – facilitate their child’s confusion about whether he is a little boy or a little girl. Even seeking drugs for the child to retard the natural approach of puberty, lest he/she be found out with much greater certitude and faced with much more difficult “procedures” to reverse nature’s error, should that be necessary. Better to keep the child a child as long as possible, so he/she can decide at leisure which “gender” he/she “really” is or wants to be – the evidence of the childhood body being, of course, irrelevant.

But this denial of the obvious, in favor of the (for the present) psychologically easier fantasy, did not appear among us overnight. The world has been in denial of reality for a long time, and as the globe has shrunk under the roaring advance of technology, the New Truths of the New World have more and more filled the vacuum left by the rejection and denial of His Truth, the first one being that He IS. Once God-denial was successfully made fashionable in all the upper echelons of society (academics, science, government, entertainment,…), the rest is downhill. And that says it all. We are racing to the bottom at break-neck speed – the bottom of civilization, at a peak of technological potential, at the bottom of the abyss of moral decadence. We are pandering to our lusts, our narcissism, our self-obsession, our unashamed hedonism, to their final end. After all, God is dead. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

The most difficult thing for me to see, as this tragedy unfolds before us, is the confusion in the Church. The Rock of eternal and absolute Truth, which mankind was invited to stand upon and build our lives and our civilization upon, seems today to be wavering in the winds of relativism. In the 1960’s, as the Church was pondering a new evangelistic approach to the world outside, the spirit of this world was unleashing its own preemptive counter-attack: sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. And today? God help us! The world is everywhere among us – within us – around us. Jesus left so many words that ought to sober us! Among the many: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith upon the earth?”

When the last of these Last Days does come, when the full measure of evil of the evil one is finally unleashed, will the Church have the holy faith to stand? His Church has the means for so much! The wisdom and holiness of so many saints are ours to embrace! The Bread of Life, the Holy Eucharist, is given to us to nurture and strengthen and deepen our interior life of faith, of prayer, of communion with Him, of holy and eternal Love! So much of His eternal Truth has been entrusted to His Church, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit as promised by Jesus! But are we embracing and receiving and clinging to the all of our heritage? Are we being faithful disciples, listening to and learning from and growing in Him? Sadly, I see too little of that. Instead, I see too many as it were “part-time” Catholics, blending and mixing and compromising their lives as Catholics with their lives in the world. And their children and their grandchildren are watching, and learning from them.

Jesus spoke of the “signs of the times”. Are we awake to what is happening? Can we hear the groaning of the creation, under the weight and the pollution of the culture of godless man? Can we see the horrors of inhumanity erupting like volcanoes around us, in the mass killings, in the epidemics of suicidal drug addiction, in mothers killing their children and children killing their mothers and their fathers, in the animal-like insanity of gangs, of meaningless sex, of a desperate seeking of anything but the right thing to fill the emptiness of a life without God?

Eph 5:14  Therefore it is said, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.”
Eph 5:15  Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise,
Eph 5:16  making the most of the time, because the days are evil.
Eph 5:17  Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.