Broken Down by Wokeness

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Francis

Back at the founding of our republic John Adams famously prophesied that the Constitution was designed to govern a religious and moral people, emphatically adding that it was not fit for any other kind. Now, some two plus centuries down the pike his observation is being proven out in real time. Wokeism is plaguing and eating away at the foundations of American society. Confusion reigns in the public square because the American people, too many of whom have fallen away from religion altogether, are being relentlessly gaslighted by their own leaders and public officials, greedy to obtain ever more power and control over our lives, our families, even our inmost thoughts.

This unpleasant fact was forcefully brought home to me recently as I watched a televised interview featuring a state senator from a wealthy suburban Detroit district. Identifying herself as a typical educated white Christian female she went on to rail against those parents who were upset by their five and six year old children being exposed to LGBT sexual ideology in the public schools. She was utterly dismissive of the notion that any kind of sexual content presented to kindergartners might either be age inappropriate or something rightly reserved to parents to discuss with their own children. Instead she turned the table on the parents insisting that they were essentially hateful bigots for wanting to shield their innocent offspring from sexual indoctrination wrapped in the fig leaves of “education” and “equity.”

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The Fall of Rome ~ Part II

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Francis

History moves in a circular motion. The old civil / military Roman Empire was a power which disintegrated in the 5th century mostly from internal rot and corruption. In the vacuum left behind there arose a new kind of Ecclesial Roman Empire. We know it today as the Roman Catholic Church. But, like its predecessor, this ecclesial empire is on the verge of crumbling, again mostly from the effects of internal corruption. Granted, throughout the intervening centuries it has threatened to topple more than once, beset by mismanagement and even moral corruption, yet it is still with us, undoubtedly through Divine support and assistance. But the present crisis is acute and alarming as any that Ecclesial Rome has ever had to face to date. It seems many in the highest echelons of the Church’s leadership have decided to align themselves with the Freemasonic secular globalist agenda, even to the point of persecuting their own clerics who remain faithful to the Church’s most long-held traditions.

The following is excerpted from my recent follow up essay on Masonic Illuminism (which I will shortly post in its entirety) entitled: Masonic Illuminism ~ “Elites” Waging War on Humanity; on Religion; on your Family. Please read this section, and share widely with your friends and family, concerning the subtle attack on the historic Faith of our Fathers at the hands of “progressive” theologians such as Karl Rahner, beginning back in the 1960s. If we are not aware of a threat we cannot intelligently oppose it and, following the example of our neighbors and great patriotic Canadian truckers, this fight cannot wait till another day.

Taken from Masonic Illuminism, Part 3 ~ Illuminism’s Final Assault

Renowned theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand rightly notes that (Rahner’s) ambiguity (regarding Communism, Freemasonry, etc.) is less an error than an outright deception which only gives the impression of sharing common ground. He goes on to observe, “Such a misrepresentation of the facts leads not to dialogue, but rather to a wishful (and dangerous) minimizing of the differences between Christianity and Communism… The ambiguous use of terms by (such) Catholics, therefore, only serves Communist propaganda and spreads confusion among Catholics themselves.”

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Gnosis ~ Light that leads into Darkness

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Francis

Christ is the true Light of the world, but there is another, false light which ultimately leads one only into darkness. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness could not comprehend it. The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world… yet the world knew him not.” (Jn 1: 5;9,10) And the reason it knew him not is because there has always been a competing, mendacious light in the world designed only to lead men astray. In the 18th century vicious pirates would sometimes light a fire at night along some rocky patch of shoreline hoping to lure unsuspecting ships to their destruction on the jagged shoals. Just so, the false light which the ancient enemy of God sets up as a guiding beacon is actually intended to lure unsuspecting souls into ruin on the spiritual shoals.

Such false beacons have taken various forms over the millennia, and one of the more dangerous of these deceptive “lights” has long been Gnosticism. Gnostic comes from a Greek word for knowledge, and Gnosticism encourages the notion that some secret learning or knowledge will somehow provide one the key to success and happiness. It treats the “light of reason” in the same way, as indeed a replacement for the Christian “light of faith.” Reason and knowledge is what will free one from this broken world of pain and evil. Sin is no longer a moral fault but merely the effect of ignorance. Spiritually this is a deadly notion because it deflects our attention away from combating sin, the real root cause of our unhappiness, and redirects the will to fighting other things like poverty and ignorance which are only the symptoms, not the real root of human problems.

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Eucharistic Coherence and Public Sin

Posted on June 23, 2021 by Francis

Considering all the brouhaha over the question of pro-abort politicians being admitted to Communion and all subsequent hand-wringing by various bishops on what to do, the answer is simple. Enforce Canon Law #915 which clearly states that obstinate public sinners are to be denied Communion, not out of any meanness but in true charity for these souls which have put themselves in such grave danger. There is really no need for a study group or special commissions or joint statements. Each prelate in his own diocese holds both the power and the responsibility for preventing blatant sacrilege, while also seeing to it that the faithful at large are not unduly scandalized. No, it doesn’t take some special document to fulfill one’s apostolic duties.

One of the issues that seems to be muddying these particular waters, however, is confusion on the part of the laity about the nature of grave sin. Many so called “cafeteria Catholics” have convinced themselves and others that no one should have the right to determine what is objectively sinful. Moral relativism is the flavor of the day among too many Catholic politicians who seem to believe that persons ought to decide for themselves what is sinful and what is not. In this attitude they are confusing two very different things, objective sin and subjective culpability. I am no trained moral theologian, so I need simple illustrations to help me understand the distinction between objective sin and subjective culpability. I therefore imagined some kind of meter with a red line running down the middle marked 100%. Think of that red line as the objective sin boundary. Everything to the left, going from 0 to 99%, is less than grave matter and therefore not sinful (mortally). Everything to the right of the red line, 100% and above, is grave matter which, objectively speaking, represents mortal sin.

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Tolerance Corrupted

Posted on May 20, 2021 by Francis

Living in a pluralistic society such as ours, a keen spirit of tolerance is essential to ensure social harmony. In fact, our American republic is founded on the presumption of mutual tolerance, something we pride ourselves upon. Yet how easy it is through excess for human nature to turn a virtue into a vice. The philosopher Karl Popper shrewdly observed that unlimited tolerance eventually produces intolerance. Popper warned about pursuing tolerance to extremities, for when that happens the thing turns into its very opposite, and brings about a culture of intolerance.

This is what we are quite plainly seeing in our society today, rife with its “woke” cancel culture. There needs to be some natural limit to what people will tolerate because unchecked tolerance does not produce social peace and harmony. Instead it empowers the most intolerant factions to weaponize tolerance against the very same well-meaning individuals who are busy tolerating everything and everybody. For the intolerant, tolerance is always a one-way street, namely the obligation of you to tolerate whatever I may say, do, or think with no corresponding obligation on my part to be tolerant of your views.

A good example of this lopsided dynamic has been the infiltration of liberal democracies such as France by radical Islamists who have taken full advantage of the freedoms provided by that liberal democratic state to impose their very illiberal Shariah law upon certain neighborhoods around Paris and other large cities. And once control is seized by an intolerant minority any real semblance of toleration evaporates like the morning mist. In short, unlimited tolerance fails to provide a secure peace because it enables and shields the most intolerant factions to bully the more tolerant population into submission. Such feckless tolerance refuses to confront evil before it assumes tyrannical proportions. And any protest after the fact is too late, and too feeble, to restore the necessary balance.

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The Passages of Time

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Francis

Today marks the 25th anniversary of my father’s death. Dad was a person of sterling integrity as well as tremendous love for my mother and their eight children. But the real legacy he left us was a deep respect for, and the unwavering pursuit of, truth. For dad the eternal verities were dearer than life itself. Perhaps I did not fully appreciate his true genius in my younger days, but time has a way of changing our perspectives. What astounds me today is that a quarter of a century has passed away which, in retrospect, feels like a year at best.

Back when my father was just a small child, Albert Einstein discovered the truth that time is not a constant but rather a variable. True, because for us time feels like something that becomes more compressed the longer we measure it. It behaves like those layers of silt and debris which settle and are flattened into geologic formations so that one inch of sandstone might represent 10,000 years of earth’s history. Continue reading →

The Sacrificial Imperative – Introduction

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Francis

I am not a particular fan of Sigmund Freud’s theory of man which devolves around his so-called ‘Oedipus Complex’ and purports to explain some of man’s deepest primal drives. Nevertheless, the agnostic Freud clearly recognized a seemingly hard-wired cultural trait that repeatedly emerged among virtually every tribe, ethnic group, and civilization, namely the impulse to offer sacrifice. But what was one to make of this mysterious activity which made little sense to an enlightened ‘man of science?’ Hoping to distance this stubbornly recurrent phenomenon from its more natural psycho-spiritual moorings, the good doctor constructed an elaborate thesis to explain man’s predilection for sacrifice in psycho-sexual terms, Freud’s favorite home turf. He treats the subject extensively in his classic work Totem and Taboo which, despite its erroneous conclusions, does provide us with a compelling explanation of the causes and meaning of sacrifice. Continue reading →

Abiding Truth – Dwelling Among Us

Category Archives: Faith and Science

Broken Down by Wokeness

Gnosis ~ Light that leads into Darkness

Eucharistic Coherence and Public Sin

The Passages of Time

The Sacrificial Imperative – Introduction