Wake Up!—We Are in the Last Minute of Extra Time: The Descent into Devilry

Iwas born in England before the Second World War, during the pontificate of Pope Pius XI, with an affliction that I once thought was the curse of my life but that I now see was my greatest blessing. There are degrees of dyslexia, and I was 40 degrees below zero. It would seem that my predicament was hopeless, and others thought the same at the grammar school where my parents paid for me to be educated because I could not even sit for a scholarship, never mind pass it. They hoped that a miracle would take place; but in those days, the teachers did not know what dyslexia was, so I was just written off as stupid or a lazy layabout who could only be cured by the “strap.”

A miracle did not take place, at least not the sort of miracle for which my parents prayed. The first blessing that I received was that I was rescued from the herd—who, I came to realize, were being seriously and spiritually misled by secular priests in the name of a classical education and a flawed Catholicism. In my last three years, my parents further paid for me to be a boarder, while continuing to pray for the sort of miracle that never came. The Lightning-Fast Fie... Whitman, Matt Check Amazon for Pricing.

But in those years another sort of miracle did come. I came to know and put my trust in a very good and Holy Priest who became the center of my life and from whom I received my vocation and engineered my passage through to join the Franciscan Order, despite the lack of qualifications that were unknown to my future superiors.

After a year’s novitiate and two years of philosophy—in which time I painstakingly taught myself to read and write, at first badly, and then very well—it was discovered that I was not an intellectual cripple after all. But it would be almost 20 years before a doctor diagnosed what I had never known. Thanks to the Holy Priest, who not only continued to take an interest in me but who taught me to pray and even led me into the beginning of the contemplative way in the novitiate, I began to see more clearly than my peers what was happening to the Church into which I was born.

My first eye-opener was that apart from the Divine Office, which is the outward expression of our love of God, nobody appeared to turn to personal prayer. It is only here that true love is first generated under the influence of the Holy Spirit, which determines the sincerity, the conviction, and the heartfelt way in which the Divine Office, in which this love is expressed, is read, recited, or sung.

My second eye-opener was when I began my four years of theology. There were three major subjects—Scholastic Theology, Moral Theology, Canon law—and the “lesser subjects” of Church History and Scripture. Spiritual Theology was not taught. Systematic Theology teaches how to come to know God and His relationship with His creation, whilst Spiritual Theology teaches how to love Him.

Without Divine Love, every religious institution is bound to fail. When I joined the Order, there were over three hundred members of the Province. Now the Province is no more. What happened to them happened to a myriad of other religious orders that have not been able to reinvent themselves to survive without the sort of prayer that can alone save them. “With love all things are possible, without it nothing is possible.”

My third eye-opener began in 1969. A side effect of my dyslexia was that what I was able to learn in my theology, and that included what was then called the New Biblical Theology that was outlawed by our teachers, was retained on the hard disc that resides in my mind never to be lost. Then my initial lack of inability to express myself with the written word was compensated by an ability to express myself with the spoken word. Catholic Prayers Nelson, Thomas A. Check Amazon for Pricing.

This enabled the bishop to appoint me as the Director of his Diocesan Retreat and Conference Center in London—which at the time was the only one in the Metropolis—just five years after I was ordained. It was firstly here, from 1969-1981, then as a lecturer in Rome, then as a travelling lecturer and retreat master, that I found that my experience, far from being the exception to the rule, was the rule.

Of course this did not happen suddenly. It all began at the Renaissance when the previous Credo, “I believe in God,” was replaced by the new Credo, “I believe in man.” To begin with, this new Credo was the Creed of the few. However, the few were in a small majority that grew progressively over the years.

After the Council of Trent and for a hundred years or more, the old Credo was mainly in force, enabling many spiritual writers to maintain that these years were the high point in Modern Catholic Spirituality. But the change came rather suddenly, and “the few” became the many as anthropocentric spirituality received a shot in the arm when the growing heresy of Quietism, which led people back into Protestantism, “inspired” anti-mystical fanatics to crush any form of prayer that had the slightest whiff of Quietism about it (see Enthusiasm by Msgr. Ronald Knox: chapters XI & XII).

This new Credo received a further shot in the arm. For as the effects of the anti-mystical witch hunts were succeeding, the Enlightenment rose up in all its human glory to damn everything that could not be subjected to reason, not God’s reason but man’s reason. They could neither see nor understand that the greatest power in Heaven or on earth comes from God—namely Divine Love—because it is superrational and so cannot be put under the microscope of human reason.

Without the all-pervading Love of God which had been all but banished in subsequent centuries, except for the faithful few, disaster after disaster followed in ever increasing numbers. Without the infused virtues (and in this case without the infused virtue of wisdom) that St. Thomas insists are only given to us through and after purification in prayer, the new god of reason cannot function properly. For it is not primarily inspired, guided, and governed by the pure love that comes from within God but by the twisted love that comes from within man, as Sigmund Freud would show later, demythologizing Original Sin.

Through personal revelations such as the revelation that introduced the Sacred Heart and the many further revelations of Our Lady, we have been called back, again and again, to opening ourselves to receive the Love of God and the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit. Although these make saints out of sinners, the mainstream Church has remained aloof. The apparitions that took place at Fatima, for instance, were authenticated by the Church herself; but bizarrely, Our Lady’s clear instruction was ignored. She had instructed in her letter to be opened in 1960 that the whole Church was to be recalled to repentance, prayer, and sacrifice. This message was urgent because if it was not received and acted on, certain specific and terrifying consequences would follow. Catholic Prayers for A... Check Amazon for Pricing.

Then something outrageous took place that was worthy of Renaissance man, suffused with the Spirit of the Enlightenment. Human arrogance triumphed over the revelations that they themselves had verified as authentic. The pope ignored Our Lady’s clear instructions, as did subsequent popes, and he called a council instead. Has there ever been a previous council when so many bishops came together with their theological advisers when the vast majority of them had been so deprived of the deep prayer in which St. Thomas says God gives the infused virtues, most especially in this case the infused virtue of wisdom?

You cannot just pray to the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide your deliberations when in the last three hundred years or so you have methodically extracted from Catholic formation the ongoing journey through meditation and into contemplative prayer that enables Him to do what cannot be done without Him. Today, synodality has devised a man-made method called discernment to guarantee that you get the answers that have in fact been agreed upon before the process begins. Genuine Catholics can see through these unholy confidence tricksters a mile away because they see with eyes purified by the Holy Spirit.

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