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
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.
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