January 3, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Two Published Essays in THE REMNANT NEWSPAPER

Friends,

I pass along today two essays that I have had published within the past week in THE REMNANT, the nation's leading traditionalist Catholic journal. The first is a Christmas meditation and appeared online at:  https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/3624-christmas-offers-hope-through-the-mists-of-despair] It's title is "Christmas Offers Hope through the Mists of Despair."  Please check it out and the other fine articles at THE REMNANT  [https://remnantnewspaper.com ]

The second essay has appeared both in the print edition of THE REMNANT (which is a fortnightly) and online (although only subscribers may read the online version). The print copy was published in the December 31, 2017 [vol. 50, no. 22] issue. Again, I recommend a subscription to this excellent journal, which is by far the best and most informed publications not just on the Satanic revolution going on with the Catholic Church, but the general assault on all of Christianity.

Dr.  Boyd D. Cathey
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Christmas Offers Hope through the Mists of Despair

 https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/3624-christmas-offers-hope-through-the-mists-of-despair

by  Dr. Boyd D. Cathey   Saturday, December 23, 2017

Christmas, along with Easter, it is one of the two most significant days of the calendar year for Christians, and, indeed, for ALL men worldwide. At this time of year we turn our thoughts to the Holy Feast "In Nativitate Domini Nostri Jesu Christi," as the ancient Latin liturgy announces to us.  What happened in Bethlehem a little over 2,000 years ago, and our memory and commemoration of that oh-so-critical event that forever changed human history, and its implications and clarion call to us now twenty centuries distant, demand our attention...and action.

No one, not even the pagan, nor the ISIS militant, nor the raving village atheist who believes that with modern "science" he has figured out everything and doesn't need a "God"—No one escapes Christmas and the Question it poses to mankind. The Creator's Grace through Our Lord is offered to all men, sufficient grace for us all and an ironclad promise of Salvation, if we choose to accept it.  And the Question is: How shall we respond?

We cannot avoid that offer, even if we attempt to hide from it. Our Lord chases us down, searches us out, He will not let us go until the very last moment of our lives. He is the Good Shepherd as He recounts in the Parable of the Lost Sheep [St. Matthew 18: 12-14; St Luke 15:3-7].

I remember the fascinating case of the great Irish writer and professed atheist, James Joyce. Early on an apostate from his Catholic upbringing, he had one of his literary characters proclaim: "I will not serve what I do not believe," [from A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man] and in a letter he wrote: "My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity...." Yet Joyce, like many fallen-away Christians, could not escape the Faith and its message. For his entire life he wrestled with it and could not get away from it, for it was and is the Faith and its message that make the oftentimes insanity and complexity of life intelligible, give it order and purpose. According to one observer:  "Joyce may have vigorously resisted the oppressive power of [Catholic] tradition. But there was another Joyce who asserted his allegiance to that Christian tradition, and never left it, or wanted to leave it, behind him." Indeed, a witness tells us that he cried "secret tears" upon hearing Jesus' words on the cross. 

In so many ways archetypical modern man is like the wide-eyed teenager, exercising his newly-encountered maturity, filled with his belief that unlimited opportunities lie before him, that he has the full confidence and ability to do almost anything—and that he no longer really needs the strictures of mother and dad, and their wise counsels.

But he is wrong, for as St. Bernard of Clairvaux stated nearly 1,000 years ago, "We are as infants who stand upon the shoulders of giants." And just as we need our parents and their wisdom and direction and the inherited culture around us, so to make sense of our existence we need that free gift of immeasurable worth, that Gift of Faith and Promise of Salvation that came to us in a humble cradle in Bethlehem of Judaea.

As a small boy—I think I was about six at the time—I spent one Christmas at old Rex Hospital in Raleigh getting my tonsils taken out. I remember clearly Christmas Eve looking out the window from my fourth floor hospital room and seeing what I thought surely must be Santa Claus and his sleigh. I sat up in my bed and literally cried with joy! I had not been forgotten, and this was surely a sign that Santa was on the way to my house, and that tomorrow my parents would come and share his bounty with me, right there in my room.

As the next day came, I woke up early—there were nurses who came in first to see how I was doing: I recounted to them my marvelous vision. To which they smiled and agreed that it was indeed "very special" (although I think they attributed my vision to pain-killer!). Still, when mother and dad arrived with those special gifts, I knew—I had confirmation—that what I had seen was truthful. Santa had come and had let me know that even though I was in a hospital bed away from home, I was not forgotten.

Although I am more inclined these days to agree with those nurses' assessment of my story—even if today I cannot explain that very vivid sight out the window, the greater message of that special Christmas remains etched in my mind. No matter where we are, no matter if we are away from home, no matter if we have been separated or declared our separation from Our Creator, He does not separate Himself from us. He lets us see that "Heavenly Sleigh of Graces" that is intended for us, and which, miraculously, "came upon a Midnight clear" in all simplicity and purity.

So, while we take our collective breath and a slight reprieve from all the "important" and "critical" issues that confront us and our nation, and all the serious ills that afflict us as a people—there will be time for those--we also are reminded, vividly, of God's decision to send His Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, to live and teach among us, and to offer us His healing Grace.

Is this not the ultimate Christmas Gift to and for us? And does not it—He—beckon us to answer the Question in the affirmative? And in so doing, not only Faith and Love enter our lives, but also sustaining Hope...which enables us to meet those other challenges and issues, even if all appears lost?

And, so, we are expectant as we wait for that magical and special night, when we like the Angels can repeat that we are of good cheer, for unto us is born the Savior of the World:  ^"And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." [St. Luke 2:10-11]

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THE REMNANT 

December 31, 2017   Volume 50, Number 22

SEXUAL LIBERATION AS A WEAPON OF CULTURAL MARXISM AGAINST THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

By Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

With the “outing” of Democratic United States Senator Al Franken (MN) as a “sexual predator” and a whole A-list of film and television personalities, the continuing frenzy, the foaming-at-the-mouth hysteria to expose all manner of actual, perceived and imaginary sexual infractions, almost entirely perpetrated by men, continues unabated.  Certainly, that is not to say that some of the accusations don’t contain truth—undoubtedly they do. But I cannot but marvel at our society that for the past half century has talked incessantly of and strenuously pushed “sexual liberation” and the idea “if it feels good, do it,” and then suddenly reacts with incredible outrage and what would have been considered in an earlier age as “moral condemnation,” when the logical results of our drenching in that liberation have produced what we see unfolding before us. 

All along, the narrative of “sexual liberation”—like the cultural Marxist template on race and racism—has served as a weaponized revolutionary template, an ideological cudgel, aimed at dismantling traditional Christian standards and the Divinely-given rules that have regulated, for the good, our Western culture for nearly two millennia, and that have assured that moral order exist in society. It was precisely that order and those standards that had to be assaulted and perverted, for,  indeed, they formed an integral part of the older, traditional Christian order, an order that stood directly in the way of the triumph of cultural Marxism.

Yet, just as the Soviet Communists learned in Russia, without some standard of moral behavior, some broadly accepted rules, society and the political state become essentially ungovernable. Thus, under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and those fossilized commissars who looked out on Red Square every May Day, sexual aberrations and “perversions” (which violated traditional moral standards) were still punishable by imprisonment. Even they understood that there was no real “new” Soviet morality to replace the “old” morality that had been sanctified by the Christian Orthodox Church for ten centuries. Indeed, the proof of this is that almost immediately after the fall of Soviet Communism, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged from its semi-catacomb state, more resilient and stronger in affirming its moral teachings than ever before, as if the seventy years of Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev had been a bad dream.

And that is precisely what makes the new brand of cultural Marxists so much more dangerous, extreme and toxic, for these Marxists believe with an insane passion and conviction that is quasi-religious that human nature, itself, can be totally altered and transmogrified, that the most extreme dreams—rather, the nightmares—of some of the fiercest ideologues of the French Revolution, of “l’homme nouveau,” can be realized and accomplished. The old Soviets talked of it, wrote of it in their theorizing, and tried to implement it in various pursuits, but in fact they finally understood enough of human nature, if regretfully, that even they were forced to adjust to its reality: their theorizing was mostly just that. The genetic/biological/agricultural theories and experiments—and complete failures—of Trofim Lysenko abundantly demonstrated that irreducible fact. “Soviet Man” was an unrealizable myth.

But the desire to completely remake human nature, to turn it upside down, to re-create man, as it were, has never been that far from the center of revolutionary reverie and festering consciousness. And with the contemporary descendants of Leon Trotsky—those followers of the Frankfurt School social scientists, the modern day manipulators of biology, and the disciplinarians of bastard Freudian psychiatry and feminist theory and sexology—with this phalanx armed with the ideologically-framed results of countless foundation and taxpayer-paid “studies” and the imposing ideas on human conduct which appear relentlessly to sweep all opposition away, we confront again the unleashed Demon who promises us:  “Ye shall be as gods!”

There is no greater objective in this revolutionary effort than the near total disappearance—the perversion—of the differences between and distinct roles of male and female in our society. It is nothing less than the attempt to subvert and distort the essential laws of nature, genetics, as well as the teachings of Holy Scripture and Divine Positive Law. For nature and Divine Positive Law both recognize the essential and delicate integrity of the human being, and that the kind of deconstruction of the human personality and the unnatural approach demanded by the modernist revolutionaries leads to the visible radical dysfunction that so characterizes our society today.

In the Christian West, sex and the sexual function were traditionally understood as cradled and clothed in both natural and spiritual reality, as an essential part of human existence and the procreative and loving transmission of human life, itself, through the basic component of the family. For the most part, modern society through its virtual acceptance of cultural Marxist revolutionary theory and praxis in pushing sexual liberation has overturned and rejected this understanding, and the results are the mass of contradictions, newly-defined “mental illnesses,” and the rampant hysteria—about actions we once defined simply as “sinful” and about how we treated them.

What we see around us is the ruins of Western Christian civilization and its teachings that worked exceedingly well, attuned to God’s laws and human nature, for twenty centuries. Unlike those old, hated Soviet commissars—who in fact learned that human nature cannot be deconstructed and fatally infected without disastrous consequences socially—our newer Marxist revolutionaries are committed to applying their nefarious ideology and effecting their cancerous schemes even if it kills us all—body and soul.