In light of the presently ascendant health technocracy and the near-wholesale capitulation of the Catholic hierarchy throughout the world, these excerpted reflections of an English priest (with our emphasis) from a few years back could scarcely be more fitting.
Veni, Emmanuel…
Two thousand years ago an archangel said, “Of His kingdom there shall be no end.”
For two thousand years the world has been saying, “Of His kingdom there will be an end. Christianity will perish. The Catholic Church will go.”
…The world does not want Christianity, for the simple reason that it brings God so terribly close to man. The world does not want God close. “No dogmas, no creeds; let’s just be good to one another!” It sounds so well, that parrot cry. It means: “No Incarnation, no Redemption, no God come down from heaven, no Savior for this world!”
…To this our obvious reply is that Christ did not found a mere philanthropical society for curing public and social ills- although, actually, the Catholic Church has done more for humanity than all the philanthropists put together. Christianity does not exist to establish man in security and prosperity on earth. Its purpose is to put men in possession, not of the things of this world, but of the things of heaven.
…It would seem in these latter days that Satan and his evil angels are preparing a further scheme, in spite of all their failures in the past. The steady growth of spiritism, of occultism, of freemasonry; and, above all, of Godless humanitarianism, all point to an increased activity on the part of the powers of evil.
A Mock Church. …We speak of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, a framework, a supernatural organism living by the life of Christ. Is it beyond the genius of Satan to build to himself a parallel kind of framework, an antithesis to the Mystical Body of Christ? There is a carefully planned framework to be found in freemasonry-a supreme pontiff, a hierarchy, a temple, ceremonial worship, degrees of initiation, festivals, a creed. This planned framework is an antithesis to God’s plan for His Church. It is a deliberate plan of worship. It is naturalism as opposed to supernaturalism.
…We can no longer dismiss the humanitarian scheme as a chimera. It is something which is beginning to actualise in our very midst. Modern science is being prostituted in its service. Modern thought, as expressed in almost all de-Christianising movements of the day, is everywhere converging towards that one idea – humanity as the supreme object of attention and devotion: Man alone matters, The great god Man is growing beneath our eyes.
…Satan is no fool. “You shall be as gods” proved highly seductive in the Garden of Eden. It may prove equally seductive again. The Kingdom of Man, so widely urged today as the only means of achieving human happiness on earth, is the most alluring alternative to the Kingdom of God. I am not prophesying. I am suggesting. And I speak as one less wise.
If the Kingdom of Man is achieved, it will fail. It will procure neither man’s happiness nor the downfall of the Kingdom of God. Will the world never perceive that there is something in the Catholic Church which it can never conquer, that her existence today is a fact for which no human or natural causes can account, that every earthly kingdom has crashed beneath what she has withstood, that she survives what only a divine kingdom could survive, that her continued presence in the world is an abiding miracle of God, and that the Providence which keeps her will keep her to the end?
But if the future does hold in store some such satanic empire of neo-paganism for the ousting of the Catholic Church, then we may, indeed, expect a persecution comparable with that of pagan Rome. Satan has succeeded so far in turning nations against the Church. He will not rest until he turns the world against us. If he does that he will fail in his battle with the Church.
Let world-wide martyrdom come! Then once more we shall die smiling, with the name of a Galilean peasant on our lips, and the Church of God will march on until the day dawns and the shadows of earth flee away.
Rev. Owen Francis Dudley, from his 1936 essay, The Church Unconquerable.
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