Time To Turn Around

We celebrated yesterday the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle.  It’s a story you know well, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, which tells how one of the chief persecutors of Christians, by name of Saul, was on his way to Damascus, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord.  Suddenly a bright light shone round about him and he fell to the earth and heard the voice of Christ asking: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”  Saul was converted and baptized, becoming a great Apostle of the new religion and helping to spread Christianity throughout the known world.  His conversion was the result of a direct intervention of God, a miracle certainly, but it was by his own free will that he listened to and obeyed that supernatural voice that would change his life.

When we think of the huge change in St. Paul’s life on this day, we marvel at the power of God and the power of his grace.  We observe how someone who was thoroughly wicked and anti-Christian suddenly and miraculously became the sanctified apostle of the Gentile world.  It was the turning upside-down of the moral lifestyle of just one man, but one who would affect the whole of history from that time on.

History does have its turning points.  This was one of them, certainly, and we may permit ourselves to hope that the swing towards common sense that has been taking place recently may be another such historical sea-change.  We should caution ourselves, however, that it is very easy to misjudge history while history is in the process of happening.  We still don’t know the future, nor what potential catastrophes lurk amid all those dates on the calendar.  The world is and will probably remain on the brink of a disaster, one which could happen at any time, and the nature of which we can only guess at.  But we can’t help feeling that we’ve turned a corner, that the world has done a “one-eighty” and that we’ve been given another chance to preserve western civilization.  It may sound pretentious to have such thoughts, and yet there’s no escaping that feeling of optimism that finally, something better is gradually replacing the slump of the last dismal four years.  It’s all in God’s hands, of course, but it really does seem like those helping hands are bringing us out of a very bad place.

Without in any way trying to dampen this unchained enthusiasm, we should nonetheless remember the state of our Church.  While our nation is looking a lot better than it was, our Church is not showing too many signs of following.  In normal times, we would not want the Church to follow the world.  How times have changed!  When the present crisis in the world began back in the 1960s, the Church couldn’t wait to open her windows to the chaos, allowing the smoke of Satan to enter into the sanctuary of God.  Now that the world seems to be returning to normalcy, the Church suddenly shuts her windows and refuses to give up her love-affair with the world’s liberals, progressives, modernists, and the woke.  And while our fellow-citizens realized how out-of-touch these woke lefties are, our fellow-Catholics cannot, simply cannot, acknowledge that Bergoglio and his bishops are now the ones who are out-of-date and out-of-touch.  They cannot bring themselves to take the next step, which is to kick them out-of-office.

There has to be a reason why God has allowed the world to lead the Church in morality and common sense.  Could it be to humble the high and mighty ecclesiastics who have abused their authority to ride roughshod over the tenets of religion and the truths and moral code revealed by God?  If so, then it is high time for them to be thus humbled, and we must pray for their downfall more fervently than ever, asking God to rid us of this Satanic scourge of soul-destroyers who pretend to be our holy fathers.  Our world may feel like a better place, but it will never find true success in the eyes of God or respect in the eyes of man until the Church is restored to its unity and holiness.

We prayed for good election results.  Our prayer was answered.  God is ready now to answer our next prayer.  So let’s pray it.  On this first day after the Chair of Unity Octave, let us pray for the conversion of all who remain chained in misplaced loyalty to the apostate Bergoglio.  Let us pray for the conversion of the entire Conciliar Church, that all may hear the voice of our Savior, as he pleads with them, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”