There But For The Grace Of God
If I told you that a mass murderer was coming to your house for dinner, what would be your reaction? Would you make sure you take out your best china, create a banquet of culinary masterpieces, have the best wine prepared, and maybe even hire a team of servants and waiters? I would like to think that you would recoil in horror at the prospect of welcoming such a man into your home—someone who has no compassion for the lives he destroys or the thousands of innocent children he makes it his life’s work to physically tear apart. Which brings me to Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland…
It should come as no surprise that the Irish welcomed the former Vice President of the United States with such wild enthusiasm. There is a saying in Latin, corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst of all. And it is certainly true that the Irish were some of the best, most fiercely loyal Catholics in the world, suffering centuries of persecution for their faith, enduring hardships beyond measure so that they could remain devoted children of the Church and pass on that faith to their own sons and daughters. When it came to defending the faith, the Irish were indeed among the very best. But if the corruption of the best is truly the worst, what are we to expect from today’s inhabitants of the Emerald Isle?
If we love the Irish, we must look upon their corruption with the utmost dismay. Certainly the bulk of the blame for their moral decline lies with Vatican II and the ravages that followed, not just in Ireland but throughout the entire Western World. Like everywhere else, very few of the Irish fought to keep the faith intact, preferring to subject themselves to the modernist reforms of their priests and bishops. And yet a modicum of moral fortitude remained, and even as late as 1983, the good people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to protect the unborn and to ban abortion. The result of the referendum was an Eighth Amendment to the Republic’s Constitution. This amendment “acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right”.
Unfortunately, the Devil and his supporters could not abide this restriction to their own warped idea of liberty and the right to do whatever they want. Gradually they whittled away at this law and with their usual very effective propaganda, enthusiastically spread by their willing lackeys in the mass media, they managed to change the deep-seated and Catholic moral fiber of the general population.
Thus in 2018, the Irish people were once again asked to vote in a new referendum. On 25 May, voters went to the polls, where the ballot asked if they wish to approve the 36th Amendment to Ireland’s constitution. This would overturn the 8th Amendment, the ban on abortion. Heavy turnout resulted in two-thirds of the country voting in favor of ending the country’s ban on abortion, 66% to 33%. This devastating vote to approve the mass murder of unborn babies was praised by Ireland’s Prime Minister, who said that “What we have seen today really is a culmination of a quiet revolution that’s been taking place in Ireland for the past ten or twenty years.” He was right. It was a revolution against the laws of God and of nature. We should not be surprised that Prime Minister Varadkar was so happy about it—he himself was an apostotate Catholic and Ireland’s first openly homosexual Prime Minister. What is sad is that this revolution was welcomed by the majority of the Irish people, a revolution that they confirmed in a later referendum legalizing same-sex marriage. Corruptio optimi pessima.
We can begin to understand now why the Irish lavished such a warm welcome on the evil Joe Biden. After all, they share his monstrous beliefs that fly in the face of our loving God. To the majority of Irish people he is “Cousin Joe”, pushing the same laws in the United States that they had so enthusiastically voted for in Ireland, from permitting the murder of innocent babies or same-sex marriage, from the encouragement of homosexuality and other vices, even to the public promotion of gender-altering surgery on our young children. Ireland has very quickly lost its Catholic faith only to welcome back its ancient pagan roots. How sad that such a deeply Catholic country should become the devil’s playground so quickly. And if it can happen in Catholic Ireland, don’t think it can’t happen here in our own traditional Catholic families.
In fact, there is no doubt that we too are in danger of “going downhill” in the face of the constant barrage of propaganda from the world. We must examine our own consciences when the Church’s two-thousand-year-old teachings are questioned and placed in doubt by her enemies. Are we giving any credence at all to the never-ending onslaught of propaganda? Are we starting to “feel sorry” for the “poor gay people” who have been “so cruelly persecuted”? Do we feel a twinge of relief, maybe even approval that the modern permissive agenda has extended to the point of allowing homosexual acts to be openly shown on our TV screens and drag queens to perform their perversity in front of our children? Are we waivering? Entertaining the possibility perhaps of allowing our children to drift into this new woke culture where they can do anything and everything with impunity—anything, that is, except hold to the teachings of the Catholic Church?
Today, the Sunday after Easter, is all about faith. St. Thomas the Apostle is forever known as Doubting Thomas because he did not have enough faith. He could not bring himself to believe that our blessed Lord had risen from the dead, that he was truly God. We will be judged in the same way. If we willingly and deliberately doubt any of the truths of the Church, our fate is clear, highly unpleasant, and worst of all, eternal. God is Truth. He abhors any swerving from the truth, whether it be dogmatic truth or moral truth. Thus we may not sympathize with those who so ignorantly believe they are protecting women by allowing them to murder their offspring. We may not sympathize with those who toss out the Church’s laws on marriage and decide they can marry whoever they want, even if they’re unbaptized, or the same sex, or divorced, or whatever. “It’s my life and I’m entitled to do whatever I want with it.” This is the mantra of the woke, the millennials, their most basic belief. And it is wrong. It is against the faith. Those who profess or act out such a belief, in whatever may be the form of their choice, must not be cherished and tolerated. They must be reprimanded. Tough love is sometimes the only love that is effective.
We must protect ourselves against these evildoers. We must not let the slightest glimmer of light that is our faith be corrupted by these people who seek nothing but unrestricted pleasure and power, and who look on traditional Catholics as the last vestige of God’s influence warring against them. Make no mistake, they’re coming for us. They will not treat us with love, not even with tough love! Sooner or later, we will be faced, like our Irish ancestors, like St. Thomas, with the choice of believing or doubting. St. Thomas made the right choice in the end. Hopefully, Ireland will one day return to the faith too. But meanwhile, the battle lies in our own homes, where the tentacles of the woke weave their way from our TV screens and dozens of Internet devices and into the minds of our own children, even into our own heads. We’ve seen how Ireland fell. Let’s remember that “there but for the grace of God go I.”