What's Been Bothering Me

You've probably noticed that my updates have been a lot more sporadic lately and have been more news-focused than a lot of our typical fare. Not to mention that a lot of my commentary has probably been even more dour than usual. An issue has come up again that really has been making me uneasy lately. Since this blog is essentially my way of venting to the universe, I figure I can let it all out here.

You may now don your tin-foil hat.

Basically, the event in question is the recent grand jury happenings in Philadelphia. It recalled to mind certain facts.

The Church has enemies, both earthly and supernatural. This is ignored and/or denied by most folks, it seems. Regardless of historical evidence and common sense, few people I speak with acknowledge that many worldly powers would enjoy it very much if the Catholic Church was destroyed.

Bringing up Satan and his infernal legions as our chief Adversary usually results in amused chuckling.

The Church's enemies are not stupid. Far from it. The temporal foes are of a pretty high caliber as far as humans go. Communism alone has had a lot of really smart guys pulling the strings. Even today, we see how far they were able to get with the smear campaign against Pius XII. Bella Dodd was saying just a few decades ago that the Church had been infiltrated by those who wanted to destroy it from within, so you don't even have to look to AA-1025ish accounts or the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita for further reinforcement of this kind of thing.

Now, if the temporal enemies are smart enough to do this, the supernatural enemies are as well. The Irish priest who raised me in the Faith made it a point to remind people that Satan "possesses an intellect far superior to anything you can imagine." It stands to reason that The Adversary would be trying pretty hard to have some of his followers try to pass themselves off as members of the Church. It would make sense that he would want some of these followers to attempt to influence the Church from within by attaining clerical status and rank within the hierarchy.

Let me interject right now that nothing in this post is meant as an accusation against any particular bishop, priest, or anyone else. For all I know, all the guys in Philadelphia might be innocent. False accusations can be a pretty common thing. This reporting is just what made me start thinking about all this again.

Anyways, I look at this whole abuse scandal thing. Then I observe the crisis in the Church today and how individuals within our ranks conspired to engineer all this confusion (see our Vatican II posts). At this point, I have to begin wondering how things got so bad so quickly. Was the hierarchy just that incompetent? Was the world's social upheaval that bad? Were negligence, immorality, and stupidity that pervasive among the clergy that we could wind up with generations of Catholics who lost the Faith, abominable liturgies, heretics and schismatics spreading their lies with impugnity, and priests and bishops acting out the worst sins imaginable against our youth?

Or was it all planned out this way? Don't we have to at least consider the possibility? We know that Satanism is on the rise. There's no reluctance, for example, to admit that we don't have enough exorcists. We know from recent events (and history)that priests and bishops can do some pretty horrible stuff. Even Andrew Greeley claims that there is a dangerous ring of homosexual prelates in the Church who take steps to silence their opposition (just google his work on the "Boys Club"). Is it so big of a leap to consider that their motivation might be to destroy the Church? Whether it's in the name of some secular ideology or some allegiance to the Prince of Darkness, is it that incredible to consider? Of course, the former would be merely a tool of the latter, but the point remains the same. How much of what we are going through is by design?

I'm sure many of you think that this is insane rambling. Possibly so. I hope so. It just strikes me as more and more unlikely that so perfect a storm could arise merely by negligence or the random confluence of so many evil and heretical impulses all at once.