All is well
“This is not going to last much longer. Hold on fast to Christ and Mary.”
It is good advice from my sometime Argentine correspondent, Carlos Caso-Rosendi. He has been patiently reviewing that “Amazon Summit,” in which all kinds of ecclesiastical enormities are being committed by the amateur Rousseauians and neo-Marxists in the pope’s “progressive” entourage. We have seen “liberation theology” in action before. It will burn out eventually.
The same could be said for all the world’s ideologies. New ones come along in their course. Each burns out, after having done a great deal of harm in human lives and souls. Modern resistance tends to focus on the material wreckage, alone, but as Flannery O’Connor observed, “You can’t be any poorer than dead.” I mentioned Zimbabwe and Venezuela last week, but proceeding backwards through the alphabet, we could list innumerable cases — in nations, but alas, too, in Holy Church by the fiends who would capture her to advance their own, very worldly ambitions. I can’t think of a century, among the last twenty, without ecclesiastical disasters; of one in which appropriations have not been attempted — invariably accompanied by a new heresy which, on closer examination, turns out to be an old one. Read Ecclesiastes again.
Looking only in my electronic inbox, I find several more attempts, by the sub-intellectual busybodies of today. One correspondent is selling “veganism.” He asks me to respond to multiple assertions that his dietary code is redemptive, and compatible with Catholicism. Another forwards an article from the poisonous Washington Post, asserting that Africa is transforming the Church, into a new “post-colonial” entity. At the current episcopal Summit we are told that we must take moral and spiritual instruction from the Amazon jungle tribes.
The truth in each argument has been inverted. A substitute has been inserted for the premiss of Christ; everything goes belly up from there.
Hold on fast to Christ, and to Mary, who points always to Him; hold on fast through the latest wild rides. Eventually each reckless vehicle will crash. Then another will come along to take its place, until it, too, crashes with all aboard. Again, we will be offered some eye-catching novelties. Those with some genuine learning will note, again, that we’ve seen it all before. We know how the next wild ride will end: also very badly. We know that all is not right with this world, and if our faith holds, or even when it is shaken, we can know what common sense is singing. “There is a crack, a crack, in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Even Leonard Cohen got this.
The sound teaching of the Church, through the centuries, has been the constant teaching of Christ. It is often subject to misinterpretation, but never for long. The light gets through. All the garbage left by Power in our world, will be recycled. Men whose power seems irresistible one day, are themselves cleared away on another — whether or not we ever found a way to overthrow them. The fate of the Earth is not in human hands.
Joy, not despair, is at the heart of the Creation. “Fear not,” we are repeatedly told. All is well, all will be well, all manner of thing shall be well. Hold fast!
Or as I like to say in the colloquial: “Don’t let the bastards drive you out of the Church.”