Behold A World Starved of Grace
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Behold a world starved of the graces won for human beings by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, on the wood of the Holy Cross, that flow into our hearts and souls through the loving hands of Our Lady, she who is the Mediatrix of All Graces.
Behold a world of madness, a world shaped by the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King by means of the Protestant Revolt.
Behold a world that has plunged headlong into the abyss without realizing that this is so, a world where men and their nations have, casting aside the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by His Catholic Church, placed themselves under the reign of the devil under the slogans of "liberty," "equality," "fraternity," "democracy," "human rights," "dignity" and a thousand other noxious phrases that have been given us by the lords of naturalism whose falsehoods have been spawned and propagated by Judeo-Masonry.
Behold a world that is choking from a deprived of Sanctifying and Actual Graces as a result of the sacramentally barren liturgical rites of conciliarism.
Behold such a world:
Clusters of young men hurled bricks and aimed fireworks at riot
police officers before a backdrop of burning cars and buildings early
Sunday in north London as a protest turned into an all-out riot.
Demonstrators
on Saturday evening marched to a police station in the Tottenham area
of London to protest the death of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of
four who was killed Thursday in what The Guardian newspaper described as a “shootout” with officers from the Trident unit
of the Metropolitan Police, which investigates gun crime.
By 10:20 p.m. local time, the protest had turned violent. Two empty
police cars were burned and officers were “subject to bottles and other
missiles being thrown at them by the crowd,” according to a statement
released by the police. By midnight, the crowd had grown to several
hundred. An entire double-decker bus burned, the black smoke joining the
fumes from several burning shops.
Riot and mounted police
officers arrived at the scene. As of 2 a.m., groups of young men,
ranging in age from 16 to 30, were still facing off with the police, who
stood their ground behind plastic shields.
Tottenham is an area
of mostly poor minorities; a significant portion of the population is
black. “How many black people have to die around here?” asked one of the
youths, referring to Mr. Duggan. He gave his name as Pablo. “I hate the
police,” he said.
Every few minutes, as cars burned on Tottenham
High Road, young men with hoods pulled over their heads and bandanas
over their mouths launched fireworks at the officers, who advanced
occasionally but did not charge. Others searched the glass-covered
ground for projectiles to hurl. One group smashed the brick garden wall
of a residence on Rawlinson Terrace and scooped up the bricks.
As of 3:45 a.m. local time, there had been no official reports of injuries or arrests.
On
Twitter, startling pictures claiming to be from the scene popped up
almost instantly, with some posters saying the destruction included a
bus, a police station and another building.
Twitpic A photo reported to be from the scene in Tottenham.
Photos posted on the Web site Hashalbum.com/tottenham, described as being from the scene in Tottenham, depict a bus engulfed in flames and people in the smoke-choked streets.
As bystanders watched from a distance, a group of young men smashed through the glass door of a William Hill betting shop and kicked in the door of at least one private home, while helicopters
circled overhead. The smoke was so thick in places that visibility was
down to 20 feet.
By 3 a.m., it appeared that parts of the riot
zone had spiraled out of police control. An enormous fire raged in a
blocklong building, with no sign of police or fire department
intervention, even while residents raced to drive their cars away as the
building’s windows exploded and glass rained down on them. Giant fires
raged in allies, unabated.
A group of young men laden with looted
groceries sprinted down a side street, screaming, “Let’s load up!” as
more whipped past on bicycles and mopeds, back and forth into the fray.
The young men seemed to be both jubilant and deadly serious; the street
had an unsettling partylike atmosphere at times, punctuated by intense
violence.
The young men did not seem concerned about how the night might end. “I don’t care,” Pablo said. “I hate the police.”
Maria Robinson, a resident, described the unfolding chaos in an unsettling audio clip on The BBC’s Web site:
“The
police are hiding. I actually saw a group of police officers run
through an alley away from a group of people that are running towards
them,” Ms. Robinson says on the clip. “The police seem very frightened
of the situation at the moment.”
The scene echoes a 1985 riot in the same area,
when a police officer was stabbed to death by people protesting an
earlier police action that resulted in the death of a local woman. (Shops and Cars Burn in London Riot.)
Behold yet more madness in a world starved of grace, a world where young nihilistic savages, products of America's Concentration Camps, prowl the streets thinking nothing of mayhem, violence and utter destruction as veritable agents of the devil looking for bodies and souls to devour:
Milwaukee and West Allis Police are investigating a string of mob-like behavior
involving a very large and unruly crowd near the Wisconsin State Fair
Crowds Thursday night.
Several people were hurt and nearby cars and homes were damaged.
State Fair officials say 24 people were arrested inside the fairgrounds
Thursday night after fights broke out at the midway. At closing time,
those fights made their way outside the park.
State Fair Park CEO Rick Frenette says seven park police officers were injured, including two who were taken to the hospital.
Frenette
says there will be an increased police presence following disturbances
at the fair and surrounding neighborhood. And, he says all those under
18 attending the fair will have to be accompanied by a parent or legal
guardian after 5 p.m.
Milwaukee Police say just after 11 p.m.
Thursday they responded to complaints of an unruly mob attacking cars,
people and leaving damage in its path.
Hundreds of young people
left the fairgrounds and made their way down 84th Street and the
surrounding neighborhoods, smashing car windows, throwing rocks and
beating people who were leaving the fair.
Several people were punched in the face. A child was pushed to the ground.
One woman required stitches and another will need surgery for her injuries.
Police are continuing to search for suspects involved in the incident.
One witness says he saw a group of 20-30 young men attack someone walking by.
"A
group came through and the guy was kind of not really looking and was
making his way through the crowd like anybody else would, and just wound
up on his knees and they wound up punching him," says the witness.
"I had one kid you know asking me to sit on my porch until it cleared up because he was afraid to walk by himself."
Witnesses described the mobs as young African American teens. Friday, Milwaukee Aldermen Bob Donovan and Joe Dudzik released a bold statement about what they called a "deteriorating African American culture in our city."
It reads in part:
"Are large groups of Hispanics or Hmong going out in large mobs and viciously attacking whites? No.
[...]
"There
are repurcussions for single-parent homes where children aren't
properly supervised, and where they aren't held responsible for their
actions.
[...]
"We believe change must come from within the African American community, where new seeds must be sown."
Despite what happened Thursday night, there are hundreds of people entering the fair Friday morning.
State Fair officials are working with police to ensure this doesn't happen again. (State Fair Rampage: Hundreds rampage through neighborhoods.)
Unfortunately for the well-meaning and rather courageous aldermen, Bob Donovan and Joe Dudzik, there can be no change in any community absent the unconditional conversion of men to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order, thus permitting them to have access to the true Sacraments to reform their lives. There is no naturalistic solution. None. There is no way to get this savagery, this barbarism back into the toothpaste tube, so to speak.
After all, how can we expect better when the minds of men and the laws and their mores have been corrupted and poisoned by the ever-mutating heresies and sacrileges and blasphemies of Protestantism?
How can we expect better when a systematic warfare has been made upon the true Faith by the agents of Talmudic Judaism?
How can we expect better when the conciliar revolutionaries themselves, having contented themselves that the Social Reign of Christ the King is but an anachronism of the past, have made their "reconciliation" with the false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously-indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles of Modernity?
How can we expect better when God is blasphemed by alleged "Catholics" in "interreligious prayer" services and when the false "pope" praises the nonexistent ability of false religions to "contribute" to the building of a "better world"?
How can we expect better in our own country, the United States of America, where over fifty-three million preborn babies have been killed by surgical means in the past forty-four years since various states began to "liberalize" existing statutes regulating abortion in the "hard" cases?
How can we expect better when most married couples in the world, to say those who are sinning by means of natural vice, use contraceptives, most of which are abortifacients, that is, baby-killing potions?
How can we expect better when rank perversity is promoted under cover of the civil law and abroad in popular culture, when immodesty and indecency and vulgarity are on full display in the stores where they shop and never far from the lips of ordinary citizens who work or ship in those stores?
England is suffering quite precisely because of the aftermath in time of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King by the venal, corrupt Henry Tudor, Henry the Eighth, in 1534. a tyrant who presided over the killing of over 72,000 Catholics who remained faithful to the true Church despite all of the threats made against them (defection of family members, excessive taxation, loss of titles of nobility, expulsion from the convent and monastery lands, imprisonment, torture).
The United States of America, having been founded in the wake of the English Protestant Revolt, is suffering because its false, naturalistic "founding principles" had to lead to social collapse as the men who propagated those principles believed that a "self-governing people" could regulate themselves and their society by their own lights or merely with the help of some generic "God." The men who had a founding hatred for Christ the King did not believe that it was necessary for men to have believe in, access to and cooperation with Sanctifying Grace in order to persevere in virtue over the course of the long term, and such a fictitious belief must lead to the degeneration of men and their nations over the course of the long term.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in his last encyclical letter prior to his death on July 20, 1903, summarized his twenty-five year pontificate's commitment to Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal and social order very succinctly in the following paragraph:
Just as Christianity cannot penetrate into the
soul without making it better, so it cannot enter into public life
without establishing order. With the idea of a God Who governs all, Who
is infinitely Wise, Good, and Just, the idea of duty seizes upon the
consciences of men. It assuages sorrow, it calms hatred, it engenders
heroes. If it has transformed pagan society--and that transformation was
a veritable resurrection--for barbarism disappeared in proportion as
Christianity extended its sway, so, after the terrible shocks which
unbelief has given to the world in our days, it will be able to put that
world again on the true road, and bring back to order the States and
peoples of modern times. But the return of Christianity will not
be efficacious and complete if it does not restore the world to a
sincere love of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the
Catholic Church Christianity is Incarnate. It identifies Itself
with that perfect, spiritual, and, in its own order, sovereign society,
which is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and which has for Its
visible head the Roman Pontiff, successor of the Prince of the Apostles.
It is the continuation of the mission of the Savior, the daughter and
the heiress of His Redemption. It has preached the Gospel, and has
defended it at the price of Its blood, and strong in the Divine
assistance and of that immortality which has been promised it, It
makes no terms with error but remains faithful to the commands which
it has received, to carry the doctrine of Jesus Christ to the uttermost
limits of the world and to the end of time, and to protect it in its
inviolable integrity. Legitimate dispenser of the teachings of
the Gospel it does not reveal itself only as the consoler and Redeemer
of souls, but It is still more the internal source of justice and
charity, and the propagator as well as the guardian of true liberty, and
of that equality which alone is possible here below. In applying the
doctrine of its Divine Founder, It maintains a wise equilibrium and
marks the true limits between the rights and privileges of society. The
equality which it proclaims does not destroy the distinction between the
different social classes. It keeps them intact, as nature itself
demands, in order to oppose the anarchy of reason emancipated from
Faith, and abandoned to its own devices. The liberty which it gives in
no wise conflicts with the rights of truth, because those rights are
superior to the demands of liberty. Not does it infringe upon the rights
of justice, because those rights are superior to the claims of mere
numbers or power. Nor does it assail the rights of God because they are
superior to the rights of humanity. (Pope Leo XIII, A Review of His Pontificate, March 19, 1902.)
The Catholic Church is, Pope Leo XIII reminded us, Christianity incarnate, giving us yet another rejoinder to the the Ratzinger-inspired "the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church" lie that is found in Lumen Gentium, November 21, 1964. It alone had transformed pagan society from barbarism, which had indeed "disappeared in proportion as Christianity extended its sway." And paganism and barbarism and superstition have returned in proportion to the loss of the the influence of Catholicism in the world caused by the forces of Modernity in the world and the forces of the Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.
Father Frederick William Faber described exactly what the world would look like absent the merits of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus being poured out upon it:
It is plain that some millions of sins in a day are
hindered by the Precious Blood; and this is not merely a hindering of so
many individual sins, but it is an immense check upon the momentum of
sin. It is also a weakening of habits of sin, and a diminution of the
consequences of sin. If then, the action of the Precious Blood were
withdrawn from the world, sins would not only increase incalculably in
number, but the tyranny of sin would be fearfully augmented, and it
would spread among a greater number of people. It would wax so bold that
no one would be secure from the sins of others. It would be a constant
warfare, or an intolerable vigilance, to preserve property and rights.
Falsehood would become so universal as to dissolve society; and the
homes of domestic life would be turned into wards either of a prison or a
madhouse. We cannot be in the company of an atrocious criminal without
some feeling of uneasiness and fear. We should not like to be left alone
with him, even if his chains were not unfastened. But without the
Precious Blood, such men would abound in the world. They might even
become the majority. We know of ourselves, from glimpses God has once or
twice given us in life, what incredible possibilities of wickedness we
have in our souls. Civilization increases these possibilities. Education
multiplies and magnifies our powers of sinning. Refinement adds a fresh
malignity. Men would thus become more diabolically and unmixedly bad,
until at last earth would be a hell on this side of the grave. There
would also doubtless be new kinds of sins and worse kinds. Education
would provide the novelty, and refinement would carry it into the region
of the unnatural. All highly-refined and luxurious developments of
heathenism have fearfully illustrated this truth. A wicked barbarian is
like a beast. His savage passions are violent but intermitting, and his
necessities of sin do not appear to grow. Their circle is limited. But a
highly-educated sinner, without the restraints of religion, is like a
demon. His sins are less confined to himself. They involve others in
their misery. They require others to be offered as it were in sacrifice
to them. Moreover, education, considered simply as an intellectual
cultivation, propagates sin, and makes it more universal.
The increase of sin, without the prospects
which the faith lays open to us, must lead to an increase of despair,
and to an increase of it upon a gigantic scale. With despair must come
rage, madness, violence, tumult, and bloodshed. Yet from what quarter
could we expect relief in this tremendous suffering? We should be
imprisoned in our own planet. The blue sky above us would be but a
dungeon-roof. The greensward beneath our feet would truly be the slab of
our future tomb. Without the Precious Blood there is no intercourse
between heaven and earth. Prayer would be useless. Our hapless lot would
be irremediable. It has always seemed to me that it will be one of the
terrible things in hell, that there are no motives for patience there.
We cannot make the best of it. Why should we endure it? Endurance is an
effort for a time; but this woe is eternal. Perhaps vicissitudes of
agony might be a kind of field for patience. But there are no such
vicissitudes. Why should we endure, then? Simply because we must; and
yet in eternal things this is not a sort of necessity which supplies a
reasonable ground for patience. So in this imaginary world of rampant
sin there would be no motives for patience. For death would be our only
seeming relief; and that is only seeming, for death is any thin but an
eternal sleep. Our impatience would become frenzy; and if our
constitutions were strong enough to prevent the frenzy from issuing in
downright madness, it would grow into hatred of God, which is perhaps
already less uncommon than we suppose.
An earth, from off which all sense of
justice had perished, would indeed be the most disconsolate of homes.
The antediluvian earth exhibits only a tendency that way; and the same
is true of the worst forms of heathenism. The Precious Blood was always
there. Unnamed, unknown, and unsuspected, the Blood of Jesus has
alleviated every manifestation of evil which there has ever been just as
it is alleviating at this hour the punishments of hell. What would be
our own individual case on such a blighted earth as this? All our
struggles to be better would be simply hopeless. There would be no
reason why we should not give ourselves up to that kind of enjoyment
which our corruption does substantially find in sin. The gratification
of our appetites is something; and that lies on one side, while on the
other side there is absolutely nothing. But we should have the worm of
conscience already, even though the flames of hell might yet be some
years distant. To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to
be wiser--is not this precisely the maddening thing in madness? Yet it
would be our normal state under the reproaches of conscience, in a world
where there was no Precious Blood. Whatever relics of moral good we
might retain about us would add most sensibly to our wretchedness. Good
people, if there were any, would be, as St. Paul speaks, of all men the
most miserable; for they would be drawn away from the enjoyment of this
world, or have their enjoyment of it abated by a sense of guilt and
shame; and there would be no other world to aim at or to work for. To
lessen the intensity of our hell without abridging its eternity would
hardly be a cogent motive, when the temptations of sin and the
allurements of sense are so vivid and strong.
What sort of love could there be, when we
could have no respect? Even if flesh and blood made us love each other,
what a separation death would be! We should commit our dead to the
ground without a hope. Husband and wife would part with the fearfullest
certainties of a reunion more terrible than their separation. Mothers
would long to look upon their little ones in the arms of death, because
their lot would be less woeful than if they lived to offend God with
their developed reason and intelligent will. The sweetest feelings of
our nature would become unnatural, and the most honorable ties be
dishonored. Our best instincts would lead us into our worst dangers. Our
hearts would have to learn to beat another way, in order to avoid the
dismal consequences which our affections would bring upon ourselves and
others. But it is needless to go further into these harrowing details.
The world of the heart, without the Precious Blood, and with an
intellectual knowledge of God, and his punishments of sin, is too
fearful a picture to be drawn with minute fidelity.
But how would it fare with the poor in such
a world? They are God's chosen portion upon the earth. He chose poverty
himself, when he came to us. He has left the poor in his place, and
they are never to fail from the earth, but to be his representatives
there until the doom. But, if it were not for the Precious Blood, would
any one love them? Would any one have a devotion to them, and dedicate
his life to merciful ingenuities to alleviate their lot? If the stream
of almsgiving is so insufficient now, what would it be then? There would
be no softening of the heart by grace; there would be no admission of
of the obligation to give away in alms a definite portion of our
incomes; there would be no desire to expiate sin by munificence to the
needy for the love of God. The gospel makes men's hearts large; and yet
even under the gospel the fountain of almsgiving flows scantily and
uncertainly. There would be no religious orders devoting themselves with
skilful concentration to different acts of spiritual and corporal
mercy. Vocation is a blossom to be found only in the gardens of the
Precious Blood. But all this is only negative, only an absence of God.
Matters would go much further in such a world as we are imagining.
Even in countries professing to be
Christian, and at least in possession of the knowledge of the gospel,
the poor grow to be an intolerable burden to the rich. They have to be
supported by compulsory taxes; and they are in other ways a continual
subject of irritated and impatient legislation. Nevertheless, it is due
to the Precious Blood that the principle of supporting them is
acknowledged. From what we read in heathen history--even the history of
nations renowned for political wisdom, for philosophical speculation,
and for literary and artistic refinement--it would not be extravagant
for us to conclude that, if the circumstances of a country were such as
to make the numbers of the poor dangerous to the rich, the rich would
not scruple to destroy them, while it was yet in their power to do so. Just as men have had in France and England to war down bears and wolves,
so would the rich war down the poor, whose clamorous misery and excited
despair should threaten them in the enjoyment of their power and their
possessions. The numbers of the poor would be thinned by murder, until
it should be safe for their masters to reduce them into slavery. The
survivors would lead the lives of convicts or of beasts. History, I
repeat, shows us that this is by no means an extravagant supposition.
Such would be the condition of the world
without the Precious Blood. As generations succeeded each other,
original sin would go on developing those inexhaustible malignant powers
which come from the almost infinite character of evil. Sin would work
earth into hell. Men would become devils, devils to others and to
themselves. Every thing which makes life tolerable, which counteracts
any evil, which softens any harshness, which sweetens any bitterness,
which causes the machinery of society to work smoothly, or which
consoles any sadness--is simply due to the Precious Blood of Jesus, in
heathen as well as in Christian lands. It changes the whole position of
an offending creation to its Creator. It changes, if we may dare in such
a matter to speak of change, the aspect of God's immutable perfections
toward his human children. It does not work merely in a spiritual
sphere. It is not only prolific in temporal blessings, but it is the
veritable cause of all temporal blessings whatsoever. We are all of us
every moment sensibly enjoying the benignant influence of the Precious
Blood. Yet who thinks of all this? Why is the goodness of God so hidden,
so imperceptible, so unsuspected? Perhaps because it is so universal
and so excessive, that we should hardly be free agents if it pressed
sensibly upon us always. God's goodness is at once the most public of
all his attributes, and at the same time the most secret. Has life a
sweeter task than to seek it, and to find it out?
Men would be far more happy, if
they separated religion less violently from other things. It is both
unwise and unloving to put religion into a place by itself, and mark it
off with an untrue distinctness from what we call worldly and
unspiritual things. Of course there is a distinction, and a
most important one, between them; yet it is easy to make this
distinction too rigid and to carry it too far. Thus we often attribute
to nature what is only due to grace; and we put out of sight the manner
and degree in which the blessed majesty of the Incarnation affects all
created things. But this mistake is forever robbing us of hundreds of
motives for loving Jesus. We know how unspeakably much we owe to him;
but we do not see all that it is not much we owe him, but all, simply
and absolutely all. We pass through times and places in life, hardly
recognizing how the sweetness of Jesus is sweetening the air around us
and penetrating natural things with supernatural blessings.
Hence it comes to pass that men
make too much of natural goodness. They think too highly of human
progress. They exaggerate the moralizing powers of civilization and
refinement, which, apart from grace, are simply tyrannies of the few
over the many, or of the public over the individual soul. Meanwhile they
underrate the corrupting capabilities of sin, and attribute to
unassisted nature many excellences which it only catches, as it were by
the infection, by the proximity of grace, or by contagion, from the
touch of the Church. Even in religious and ecclesiastical matters they
incline to measure progress, or test vigor, by other standards rather
than that of holiness. These men will consider the foregoing
picture of the world without the Precious Blood as overdrawn and too
darkly shaded. They do not believe in the intense malignity of man when
drifted from God, and still less are they inclined to grant that
cultivation and refinement only intensify still further this malignity.
They admit the superior excellence of Christian charity; but they also
think highly of natural philanthropy. But has this philanthropy ever
been found where the indirect influences of the true religion, whether
Jewish or Christian, had not penetrated? We may admire the Greeks for
their exquisite refinement, and the Romans for the wisdom of their
political moderation. Yet look at the position of children, of servants,
of slaves, and of the poor, under both these systems, and see if, while
extreme refinement only pushed sin to an extremity of foulness, the
same exquisite culture did not also lead to a social cruelty and an
individual selfishness which made life unbearable to the masses.
Philanthropy is but a theft from the gospel, or rather a shadow, not a
substance, and as unhelpful as shadows are want to be. (Father Frederick
Faber, The Precious Blood, published originally in England in 1860, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 53-59.)
Father Faber prophesied the events of our own times.
A Catholic tradition teaches us that the world will end when the last true priest has died, either from a natural death or after having been killed, thereby the depriving it of all the Actual Graces necessary to sustain it. Indeed, this is the point of the novel written in 1920 by Myles Connolly, Mister Blue. Although I am not an expert in "end times," concentrating on my knowledge that my own "end time" could be even before this article is posted (!), we must be very close. We must be very close.
We must pray more Rosaries each day.
We must make more and more sacrifices each day.
We must recognize that, unlike the lords of Modernity in the world and the lords of Modernism in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, there is nothing short of Catholicism that can save men and their nations. There is no such "shortcut" to be found in the various and interrelated naturalistic theories of Modernity and the heresies and errors of conciliarism, including that of "religious liberty" that will be a partial focus of the next article to appear on this site.
