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Reminder for Suffering Catholics: Satan Plays the Long Game

Satan plays a long game. We know from the Gospel of Luke that Satan intended to sift like wheat Peter and the apostles.

Writing recently in National Review, Fr. Benedict Kiely has called the Church’s present trial the “summer of shame.” Before our eyes, the successors of the apostles are being sifted as well. Many Catholic commentators are saying the weakness of these wicked prelates is finally being exposed. I fear they may be wrong. Perhaps it is the diabolical strength of these prelates on display.

This moment has been building for centuries. Steve Skojec recently observed that “only a structure already compromised could fall so far so fast.”

In the context of this “summer of shame,” Bishop Robert Barron recently recalled that during the previous go-round of shame 20 years ago, he intuited that the whole sordid mess was “too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance or wicked human choice.”

Can we really now allow ourselves to think that we’ve got Satan on the run? That some episcopal hand-wringing will restore Catholic doctrine? That a few resignations will purge the Church of wicked priests, bishops, and cardinals?

I have no expectation that the perpetrators of this scourge are about to give up what has taken centuries to achieve. In fact, they may perceive this summer as their moment of triumph.

Consider the culture into which the apostate hierarchy has blended the Church:

  • The pictures of priests offering Mass while wearing rainbow vestments.
  • That picture of Cardinal Dolan at this year’s pro-sodomy St. Patrick’s Day parade.
  • The Vatican’s homoerotic Nativity scene last year.
  • The stories of the “drug fueled gay orgy” in the Vatican apartments last year.
  • The free rein given to Father James Martin.
  • The content of popular television shows, movies, and stage plays.
  • Colleges and college professors, even Catholic colleges and college professors. Providence College, for example.
  • Twitter and Facebook – what gets glorified and what gets shamed, or worse.
  • How morality has become “hate” and virtue has become “homophobia.”

To fight the scourge that afflicts the Church is to fight the culture. Is today’s Catholic ready to reject it and stand up to it?

I believe that the Satanic cabal now running the Church are counting on social pressure from the culture to see them past this “summer of shame” and beyond to a new “Catholic spring.” How cleverly they are being sifted.

The Gospel of Luke predicts that Peter will survive his trial. Jesus tells Peter, “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”

Then follows this never quoted passage, which the online Bible of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops captions “Instructions for the Time of Crisis”:

When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, did you want anything?

But they said: Nothing. Then said he unto them: But now he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a scrip; and he that hath not, let him sell his coat, and buy a sword.

For I say to you, that this that is written must yet be fulfilled in me: And with the wicked was he reckoned. For the things concerning me have an end. (Luke 22: 35-37)

Jesus says His contemporaries counted Him among the wicked. Are not those who hew to the constant moral teaching of the Catholic Church today vilified as haters? His instructions, for the time of crisis to come after the Scriptures had been fulfilled, were to fight. It is our turn and our time to fight.

If Hell is like a walled city, its gates have been closing, imperceptibly, for centuries. If nothing is done, they could soon trap all within. But Jesus assured Peter that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church. Prevail in what? In the fight that must be waged.

Then-monsignor Fulton J. Sheen in the 1930s warned of “tolerance” as the problem with the American culture. He defined tolerance as “an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil.” Eighty years on, patience toward evil has progressed to acceptance of evil. The culture has reached the point where evil now is normal. This where the wicked priests, bishops, and cardinals will take refuge. This is where we must take the fight.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, founder of the Militia of the Immaculata, pray for us.

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