November 27, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

ISIS Terrorists, Multiculturalism and the Collapse of Christianity

Friends,

Surfing through several news channels this morning I came across something that surprised me. Given just how utterly crazy and mad Europe has become it really shouldn’t have, I suppose, but it did. Being interviewed were two figures in British politics concerning the advisability of letting ISIS terrorists who are British citizens back into the country—as if nothing had happened while they were over in the Middle East or Africa blowing up little children and mothers, and cutting off the heads of anyone deemed unworthy (or who might resist their brand of Islam).

By government count some 850 Brits have gone to fight for ISIS; 425 of these have returned or are in the process of returning to England and wish to be “re-integrated” into English society.

I did not catch the name of the British citizen, a Muslim, who was defending the reentry program. The on-camera opponent of reentry of these ISIS members with British citizenship was Jonathan Arnott, a member of the UK Independence Party (and Member of the European Parliament). I found it fascinating that no member of the dominant Conservative Party or from the Labour Party or from the Liberal Democrats could be found to offer opposition.

The argument for admitting those British ISIS fighters back into Merrie Olde England basically goes: “what they did in a foreign country, overseas, does not in itself violate British law. So these mostly young men, with a few young women mixed in, should be admitted back into our society.” Arnott, the UKIP constitutional spokesman, was, rightfully, indignant. What about traditional international law, he responded. What about the laws of basic human decency and morality? Does not Britain have the right to impede or restrict entry by those who have demonstrated a willingness to kill, murder and rape, even in another country? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about the victims of Islamic terrorism, especially here in the UK, rather than letting back in those who have committed such acts, even if overseas?

That this issue is even debatable today says quite a bit about Albion’s Isle and the state of both British and European society.

Just the other day, November 24, an item regarding the Church of Sweden [Lutheran] came to my attention. The Swedish state church has decided in its wisdom to make God “gender neutral”—or rather, “gender fluid,” which is a more accurate description. That is, He will no longer be referred to as “He” and “Lord” (which are considered sexist terms). The governing body of the Swedish church has approved a new Church Handbook (or Discipline) which sets out how services, baptisms, weddings and funerals should be conducted, in language, liturgy, theology and music which are “inclusive” and “not offensive to women and minorities,” including to Muslims. And now all clergy and faithful are instructed that gender-neutral terms must be used. Suggested invocations include: “God, Holy Trinity, Father and Mother, Son – Sister and Brother, and Spirit – Lifeguard and Giver of Inspiration, lead us to your depths of wealth, wisdom and knowledge.”  (http://theduran.com/church-of-sweden-decides-to-make-god-gender-fluid/)

Additionally, the Church of Sweden has also approved the substitution of the word “shortcoming” to replace the term “sin.” Whew! That’s a relief! In one verbal sleight-of-the-hand all our sins have been wiped clean and all we have left are “shortcomings.” And most of those have to do with our failure to be “more inclusive” and “embracing of diversity,” and our opposition to potential Islamic terrorists from Syria or Libya.

Ain’t this new brand of Christianity just nifty?

Of course, it was the Church of Sweden that welcomed Muslim immigrants, many of them bringing their Islamist views with them, to worship in their churches. And this phenomenon has occurred all over Europe, with the blessing of various high ranking prelates, including the present material occupant of the Chair of St. Peter, “il papa Bergoglio,” who has, in the feverish recesses of his corrupted Modernist brain, in addition to his disastrous instructions on sexual questions, dreamt up a “natural right” for immigrants to go and settle anywhere, anyplace, despite the rather consistent Catholic theology on the subject. It seems that for Catholics and most other Christians these days the only sins—oops, I mean “shortcomings”— you can be guilty of, are to oppose Open Borders and actually believe traditional teachings on morality.

In some ways this rampant and amoral incubus that claims the mantle of Christianity in our age—this “Christianity in drag”—has not gone without opposition. Even in my church, with our belief in obedience and our security in the validity and consistency of teachings that go back to the earliest apostolic times, the actions of “papa Bergoglio” have resulted both in shock and in strong opposition, even from those who have been hitherto staunch defenders of the official Catholic Church as it has apparently “evolved” pastorally and in praxis since that disaster termed the Second Vatican Council.

Last year—September 19, 2016—four cardinals, including American Cardinal Raymond Burke, protested the direction of the Church, most especially the “teachings” coming from the Vatican, on sexual morality. Cardinal Burke, along with Cardinal Walter Brandmüller and recently deceased Cardinals Joachim Meisner and Carlo Caffarra, signed a series of very serious complaints or dubia to “il papa Bergoglio.” They made the initiative public on November 14, 2016, when it became clear the Francis had dismissed their objections and would not respond. These queries—“dubia” or “doubts”--asked that apparent extreme discrepancies and deviations from traditional teaching (most notably in Francis’ Apostolic Letter on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia) be clarified and rectified according to the doctrines of the Church.

But the four cardinals were not alone. On July 16 of last year sixty-two prominent Catholic theologians worldwide, in their document, “Correctio Filialis de Haeresibus Propagatis” [Fraternal Correction on Propagated Heresy], accused Francis of actions and words “favoring heresy.” As they state it: “We wish…to show how several passages of Amoris laetitia, in conjunction with acts, words, and omissions of Your Holiness, serve to propagate seven heretical propositions.” (https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/09/CORRECTION.html)   And on June 29 another forty-five orthodox Catholic theologians remitted an extensive and critical theological petition to the College of Cardinals, charging Francis, again, with “favoring” the same errors.  (www.dici.org)

Let it be said that none of the signatories to these appeals and documents is suggesting that the Papal Throne is empty (sede vacante), but they are indeed making the case, through powerful  and consistent arguments based in settled Catholic teaching and doctrine, that “things” have gone very far astray since the close of Vatican Council II in 1965. Almost all of these petitioners are and have been supporters of post-Conciliar popes, in positions of authority and executors in many ways of the Council—but who now find that the ultimate fruits of the conciliarism they have championed are a poisonous fruit indeed. (On this subject there is no finer and more detailed study than Professor Roberto de Mattei’s encyclopedic volume, The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story.  His work picks up where Fr. Ralph Wiltgen’s post-conciliar “tell-all” book, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, of how the progressivist episcopacies in Germany and France basically subverted the Council and pushed through ambiguous declarations, left off. Those documents—“time bombs”— while not necessarily formally denying doctrine, opened the door for the “heresy-in-practice” that has devastated the once stalwart force that stood in the way of the success of the Progressivist Revolution.)

The eventual denouement or exact resolution of this critical controversy in the Catholic Church is yet to be foreseen, although traditional Catholics take heart in Our Lord’s promise that, in the end, the forces of Hell itself will not prevail.  

This subversion of Rome has parallels and analogies in other Christian confessions, where the bacillus of Progessivist Revolution has taken hold. In some cases, as in British Anglicanism and the American Episcopal Church, the battle is virtually over and the decaying ecclesiastical shell is now possessed lock-stock-and-barrel by the very enemies of the faith. Likewise, Methodism, mainstream Presbyterians and Lutherans, and most other major denominations, including increasingly Southern Baptists (as I detailed in MY CORNER, back on October 3 of this year), have already succumbed in large part. The most resistant and steadfast opposition to the Progressivist Revolution comes, ironically, from the newly-vibrant and vigorously traditional Russian Orthodox Church which, after some seventy years of brutal oppression and purification behind the Iron Curtain, has emerged from the dark days of Soviet persecution, stronger and more holy and more resolute in its defense of traditional Christianity than any of its counterparts in Western Europe and America.

Perhaps that testing taught Russian Christians something that we in the West long ago forgot? About strength in the faith—“fortes in Fide”—and about the importance of the Virtue of Hope and the continual renewal of our Faith?

And in Britain now, in that once-indomitably staunch society where the “sun never set on the Empire,” the collapse of the Faith and its near complete perversion and conversion into just one more cheerleader for the vicious and poisonous infection of “multiculturalist” Progressivism has led to the pusillanimous establishment dithering over whether to admit back in avowed Islamic terrorists….

With notable exceptions such as organizations like the Society of St. Pius X, the true Christian spirit of Lepanto and the Crusades has all but disappeared; the apostolic injunction to go forth and convert—that same spirit that gave the world a St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier—has been discarded (most particularly by Berdoglio and by most major Protestant denominations) in favor of sharing our churches with devil worshippers.

At the base of all political questions there is a religious issue, declared Cardinal Newman more than 160 years ago. In so many ways our politics are determined by our religious outlook, our view of life, our view of man’s destiny and our understanding of our own creaturehood.  One-hundred years ago brilliant Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs understood the critical importance of religion as the basis for Western society and culture. Subverting it and utilizing it against the very culture that it helped create was a key strategy they enunciated…if they could only see how successful their strategy has been!

And my question: Is this not the ultimate tactic, the last best poisonous arrow, then, in the quiver of the Antichrist and his minions in their quest to finally win the eternal war between Good and evil?