Rebuilding Christendom is all about the children.
When Liberalism first reared its ugly head in the Masonic victory over the Papacy in 1773, together with all subsequent revolutions against hierarchy, good order, and all things true, good and beautiful by mob violence—they attacked the children.
They did this by first committing acts of parricide—the killing of the fathers and rejecting their authority and wisdom. They revolted against all that came before them and arrogantly proclaimed that they were creating a Novus Ordo Saeclorum—a New World Order—which would finally achieve a utopia on earth by means of man’s own strength. It is neo-Pelagianism. I recently came across a fantastic summation of this hubris by Rocco Buttiglione:
The modern project has been to secularize the great Christian affirmation of the meeting of the finite and infinite in Christ, presenting this reconciliation as having been brought about by the autonomous forces of nature, history and humanity—not as the gratuitous presence of God through grace.[1]
Liberalism believed that it could “pull itself up by its bootstraps” and just create a new order. The problem with man was not Original Sin and a lack of divine grace, necessitating penance and acceptance of the Gospel. Rather, it was simply a matter of wrong economics, or wrong politics, or not enough voting. So all you had to do, said the Liberals, was merely change the politics or the economics or whatever…and man would be mixed. When this didn’t work, the ugly daughters of Liberalism—Feminism and Marxism—came along with the same revolt against hierarchy on the same fundamental premise—man’s problem is not Original Sin but merely [insert your revolutionary ideology here].
What does this have to do with children? By killing their fathers and rejecting their wisdom, the Liberals, Marxists and Feminists rejected piety, the virtue by which we pay homage to our elders (Summa II-II q101). They not only rejected piety but they rejected piety as a fundamentally wrong for society. This is what Burke pointed out in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Thomas Paine answered him and showed himself to be against piety completely:
Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, who are to be accommodated… Those who have quitted the world [died], and those who are not yet arrived in it, are as remote from each other, as the utmost stretch of moral imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid down, that two nonentities, the one out of existence, and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, that the one should control the other to the end of time?[2]
With this principle, the Liberals wanted to reject all Tradition, customs, and obligations to the past as a fundamental virtue of infinite revolution.
Therefore their children could never be truly educated and raised but would receive the same anti-piety revolt passed down. Thus, the children of the revolution revolted against the revolution. Every revolution spawned a civil war…or another revolution. Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) summarized this insanity by saying “the parricidal children, becoming fathers, cannot but beget a new generation of parricides, and so on to infinity.”[3] These are the types of critiques that Dr. John C. Rao articulates in his important text Removing the Blindfold, which shows how our fathers fought against this unfolding chaos as it erupted in the 19th century.
Meanwhile, it was the children who suffered most. Some were subjected to cruel poverty, others to “public education” (read: re-education camps) which taught Liberal or Marxist doctrine instead of truth, goodness and beauty. Meanwhile, the Catholic customs of Christendom were overthrown in favor of the brave new world of Liberal or Marxist utopia which would finally, they said, free man from his superstition to religion and usher in a new era of peace and justice. As Chadwick discusses, by 1900, Europe had been greatly secularized, and in 1914-1918, ushered in the wonderful light of this utopia by butchering millions of men across the globe (with women and children dying by the thousands as “collateral damage” to the New World Order).
This is when Our Lord saw fit to send His Mother to three children in Fatima and call the whole world to repent. Jesus Christ has said, Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Mt. xviii. 3).
This Michaelmas, it’s time to restore the customs and build Christendom in our families right now. This is the mustard seed that will overcome every conspiracy of the fallen angels and their puppets in the Great Reset, COVID-1984 regime, and the St. Gallen Mafia disciples in the Vatican.
Study the customs of Michaelmas and incorporate them into your family celebration.
At the Flanders household, we are excited for another year of the Satan Piñata. You need to make or buy a Piñata, paint it red, fill it with candy, then string it up in your home. Then give plastic swords or bats to your children, and have them to yell “The Lord rebuke you!” or “Who is like God?” in honor of our captain, St. Michael the Archangel, who cast Satan out of paradise. When a child beats down a Satan piñata and gets candy, he or she is learning not only how fun Michaelmas is every year, but that the child-like faith will conquer the world, the flesh and the devil (credit to Mrs. Kendra Tierney for this fantastic Michaelmas custom).
To rebuild Christendom, we must focus all our energy on saving our souls and the souls of our spouses and children. Restoring the customs is critical to that, because it forms that “domestic church” (Lumen Gentium, 11) which will never leave a child no matter how old he is. When he sees his parents kneeling in prayer, he understands the hierarchy of being leading back to God the Father. It was this hierarchy that St. Michael defended with all the angels, and it is rallying cry of the Church militant against the machinations of the Evil One. This Michaelmas, let us enjoy the faith with our children and laugh and celebrate the joy of the life of grace, the true faith, and the happiness of being Catholic.
In Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,
T. S. Flanders
Editor
Ss. Cosmas and Damien
Photo: Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash.
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[1] Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla, trans. Guietti (Eerdmans: 1997), 49.
[2] Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (Dublin: G. burnet et al., 1791), 8-9.
[3] Vladimir Soloviev, Russia and the Universal Church (Geoffrey Bles: 1948), 198.
