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by Rafael Perez
In this day and age social media is a place where things can get hot between people. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have caused riffs between once good and trusted friends over differing opinions or positions. This can span over various things but the thing that has caused quite a bit of dissension and shock with people I grew up in the faith with is my Catholic faith. For the most part I try to not respond to people’s putting down of the faith. Once believers and now atheists post with fervent passion the hopelessness of religious kooks who still believe in the man in the sky, either forgetting everything they were taught or perhaps never having learned it to begin with falling right down the other direction of delusion. Then there are those who were once Catholic but are now members of another Christian sect. I know of people that because of private issues have lead to the destruction of their sacramental marriages have left the Catholic Faith to another group where divorce and remarriage is admissible…forgetting what Jesus said about “what God has joined no one must divide. ( Mark 10:19 ). They slowly and eventually…depending on who they are…become what would be called “anti-catholic”. They start drinking the KoolAid of both theological and historical jargon what falsely places the Catholic Church as the Great Whore of Babylon as described in Revelation chapter 17. The Pope is the Antichrist…a charge that Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Revolt, ascribed in his time. I get statements from people sending me videos about what makes Catholics pagans…worship of saints, Mary, belief in Purgatory, the sacraments. It never ends. The thing is as less hair grows on my head as I age, the less hair grows on my tongue. As a result, I’ve lost friends and acquaintances over moral and theological differences.
What I also find interesting about the debates I have with brethren from other Christian Denominations is that I’m always the one trying to defend or explain why we as Catholics believe what we believe as opposed to them trying to explain why they believe what they believe. Why is that? I’ve always found that odd. For the most part they believe in the same Jesus I believe in…again for the most part. It’s those 2,000 year old beliefs that they struggle with. They don’t understand how the Bible cannot be the only authority on faith and morality. When they think “traditions” they start thinking of candles, statues, gestures and symbols. They don’t understand that it is the oral tradition…of what has been spoken of from the beginning that has not been written down in what we understand to be the Bible. They think traditions are bad. They even cringe at the word ‘religion”. There’s a video of a young man who uses spoken word to explain how he “loves Jesus but hates religion”. It’s a pretty good poem which speaks volumes on God’s love for us through Jesus Christ, but it also speaks volumes on how ignorant a person can willfully choose to stay without honestly and with proper discretion look into terms in their proper use so as to convey truth filled messages truthfully….and honestly.
To the Protestant, Religion is equivalent to what Jesus accused the pharisees of doing in His time, of honoring the Laws of God with their lips but their hearts are far from Him, (Matthew 15:8). The heart of the Law had been compromised by their obsession with the letter of the Law. As a result, it turned into a legalistic faith. In truth what protestants label as religion is legalism. Legalism is the attempt through ritual and practice to obtain salvation through one’s own works. Most faiths are very guilty of this, including most Christian faiths. We all think that if we do this and don’t do that that would somehow matter at the end and we all end up saved. That’s not how faith works. That’s not what Jesus asked for. He made it clear to the Pharisees. He makes it clear to us. Paul speaks about it in his letters (Romans 13:8-10). We fulfill the law by what we do. We love by our actions therefore faith and works are essential to the salvation of a soul. We cannot have one without the other. Many protestant sects leave out works, sola fide. They claim scripture teaches this (sola scriptura). The fact is scripture does not teach either of these solas. One simply needs to push aside their bias and honestly look at the texts and 2,000 years of Church teaching to get it. I was on both sides of this fence so I can see this clearly.
I see it all over the internet. Catholic apologists defending against Protestant apologists. The attacks are ruthless. It’s easy to get caught up in the frustration of it, especially when one knows what the Catholic faith has taught and yet history has made it clear that it is indeed Christianity 1.0. So why the fight? Why of all other faiths the Catholic Church is the one that gets the worst rep? It’s bad enough that these horrible scandals involving the priesthood discredits 2,000 years of beautiful salvific history, but even now there’s no end to it in sight. Surely the current scandals rocking the church does not help it one bit. Many anti-catholic protestants are saying, “aha! You see! The Counterfeit Church of Satan strikes again!”
It drives me crazy.
Satan is not the stuff of horror movies, though he is horrible. He is a fallen angel with an intelligence that supersedes our own. With that informed intelligence he understands the human condition and its areas of weaknesses. Over the course of time he has used society and the minds of people to start twisting things. We perceive good things to be bad and bad things to be good. That’s why we’re having a breakdown in moral absolutes in our world today. The Catholic Church has become perceived as evil. False doctrines, false worship, false piety, false priests, false Christ.
Why can’t we see that’s how the diabolical works? Lucifer is on a smear campaign against the One True Church who defeated him on the Cross 2,000 years ago. Mary, the Queen mother has become Satan’s sworn enemy from Genesis 3. Her offspring (all Christians whether they acknowledge her or not), are the sworn enemies of his children…his offspring. Who are his offspring? Jesus was quick to call the pharisees children of the Devil, but it clearly doesn’t stop there. From the demonically and inhumanely deprived all the way to the top where there is purposeful infiltration and disorientation in a methodical mastery that only a fallen angel can conceive of. We are in a war whether we like it or not, and that war is directed especially at the Catholic Church. This is not accidental. This did not happen when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire (which many anti-catholics believe it did). This did not happen during the so- called Reformation (I call it the Deformation). This happened 2,000 years ago when Judas gave that kiss.
Let’s be real here. The Catholic Church out of all other faiths has been mocked the most in media like movies and television. It has been depicted as uptight, anti-sex, anti-fun and anti-human. The anti- Catholic propaganda machine has been churning its wheels forever. Chick Publications, a protestant- based publishing company, has been printing out false understandings of the One True Faith as well as straight up lies for decades. Other authors like David Hunt and Jerry Jenkins put down the Church, claiming it’s a system of salvation through works. Over the last 500 years, there have been more than 40,000 different kinds of “Christian” churches in existence. Some have ceased while others have thrived. They all for the most part take the Bible as their sole and only authority about the faith even though each sect claims to have it right…meanwhile the other sect down the block claims to have it right too, but they both can’t be right. So what gives?
The attack on the Catholic faith is relentless. It comes on all sides. It comes from the secular side. It comes from the militant atheists. It comes from the media. It comes from other Christian faiths. It comes from non-Christian faiths. It comes from Catholics too. That is no surprise either. Philosophical, scientific and theological weaponry both from within and without has battered this Church founded by Jesus Christ. The corrupt leadership in the past within the church has not helped things much. The corrupt scandals now plaguing the Church isn’t helping either. No. There’s something more sinister at play here and we are not seeing it for what it is. We can call it corruption. We can call it hypocrisy. We can call it falsehood. I know what to call it. Spiritual warfare.
“Then the Lord God said to the snake: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel”. (Genesis 3:14-15)
“Then the dragon became angry with the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring, those who keep God’s commandments and bear witness to Jesus”. (Revelation 12:17)
We are in the center of this war. We are at the end of it all either the offspring of the Woman or the offspring of the Serpent. There is no third choice. The Serpent wants the offspring of the woman to look bad…unattractive…boring. Even scandalous. He infiltrates the Church that Jesus founded. He attempts heresies such as Arianism and Gnosticsim, Nestorianism and Schisms from East to West to divide. To destroy. He attempts Revolutions in the form of supposed reformations to destroy the Church from within such as was the case 500 years ago. Martin Luther was a Catholic Priest. So was Arius. So was Nestorius. Every heresy set up to destroy the fundamental truths of what Jesus taught and the apostles and their successors, the apostolic fathers taught were invented by Catholic Priests. Why was that? It’s happening again. This is a plan that started way back.
In 1884, Pope Leo the XIII had a vision of Satan requesting Jesus 100 years to try and destroy the Church He founded. He was given that time. Pope Leo wrote the famous Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel because of that vision. It used to be said at the end of every Mass since then. In the 1960s it was opted out for the most part. Just recently in the wake of the scandals it has been reintroduced to the Mass.
A woman named Bella Dodd, a former Catholic raised in New York City and Student of Hunter College and NYU, joined the Communist Parties and Teacher Unions in the 1930s. Returning to the Catholic Faith with the help of the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, she gave presentations where she admitted recruiting as many as 1,100 young communists to infiltrate the seminaries of the Catholic Church to destroy her from within as new priests and new ideas that would have liberal and moral ramifications in the decades to follow. Just decades before Pope Pius the X issued an encyclical against the coming dangers of modernism and relativism against the faith. He had every bishop and priest sign off on it to commit to it not infecting the Church. They failed.
In the 1960’s the Second Vatican Council introduced new reforms to help the Church relate to a quickly changing modern world. All well and good until priests and professors within Catholic colleges and seminaries began to twist what the Council had proposed which has lead to the moral disintegration of the priesthood in the form of sexual abuse, fiscal corruption and moral heretical ideas. Pope Paul the VI’s encyclical Humane Vitae prophesied what would happen if legal and free use of contraception and abortion were to be allowed and seen as good. The human condition would slowly and surely become neutralized. Pope Paul the VI saw this. He saw it happening in his own Catholic Church by which he finally stated that by some “fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the Sanctuary”.
New Age philosophies have started being taught in Catholic universities. The Enneagram, a highly spiritually destructive and demonically inducing practice, became welcomed as a healthy psychological technique to help people. Centering Prayer, having been borrowed out of the New Age Practice of Transcendental Meditation, was welcomed in Young Adult and Youth Retreats throughout the Western World. Marriages started becoming downplayed and there is talk about divorced and civilly remarried couples to receive Holy Communion. Eventually even Homosexual acts would start to be taught by priests as being normal and as sacramental as heterosexual unions so that the Catholic Church could “get with the times.” Homilies in Mass became watered down, talking more about social justice issues, cute stories and pie in the sky niceties as opposed to the hardcore teachings of the faith which could aid us to get into Heaven and fall in love with Jesus Christ more. While all of this is happening, little girls and boys (many more boys than girls) were being systematically raped and sodomized by the clergy. Nothing being done. Everything being kept in the hush hush. Many of these children grow up angry, pained and set against the Church Christ founded. They become agnostics. They become “free thinkers”. They become atheists. They hate God, they hate the Catholic Church. They mock it. They put it down and those who still follow her, calling them “sheep”. Priests and bishops finally blowing the whistle on the scandals have gone into hiding fearing for their lives. Churches are now being closed left and right. My first Parish where I discovered my Catholic faith, Our Lady of Pity in the Melrose section of the South Bronx…gone. St. Pius, a haven for the youth of the communities whom to this day I have such strong ties to…gone. Grace House, the flagship of my faith journey where I learned my faith, shared my faith, and fell in love with my Lord and Savior as I served Him…gone. Not to mention the other parishes statewide. And this is only New York. The churches are emptying in Europe. A rise in priests and nuns being slaughtered in the Middle East is being reported. Church is going underground in China in the wake of a new communist persecution. The older generation of Catholics are dying and leaving this earth. There are not as many young people left to continue the faith.
This sounds conspiracy theory I know but must we really think that Satan’s activity is limited to scaring us in horror movies and Ouija boards? It’s been 2,000 years since Jesus Christ walked this earth and payed the price for our salvation. Satan, being a malicious yet intelligent being, along with his legions of fallen angels, has been working on destroying the message of salvation…the Gospel. The Good News. It has increased in frequency for a reason. A big reason. Bella Dodd’s testimony is only a part of it. This has been in the works before Karl Marx even wrote his Communist Manifesto. Persecutions, wars, crusades, inquisitions, schisms, revolutions have all attacked the Catholic Church with a ferocity unparalleled in the history of humanity. This is because out of all the other systems which have risen and fallen the Catholic Church is still here. Jesus kept His promise. The gates of Hell will not prevail against His Church. But it’s not over yet. The infiltration of the Church from within aligned with the Social Justice movement of the West has broken down the moral order to a place of random subjectivity. Opinions are immortalized. Spiritual realities oppressed. Sins are now just mistakes. Adultery is now an extramarital affair. Abortions are terminations. The baby is now a fetus…a tissue piece that the mother has every right to dispose of if she doesn’t want “it”. Sex is not sacred but just fun, even at the expense of conscience. There are rainbow flags everywhere expressing the celebration of homosexuality when it actually states that homosexual sex is just as good and sacred at heterosexual sex. So what if it’s contrary to the natural law of procreation? There is no natural law. There is no true morality. Its what we ever want to make of it. Those who oppose it are to be persecuted. Rooted out. Exposed.
Persecuted.
Sound familiar?
We are at the edge of the beginning of the end of the age. The offspring of the woman against the offspring of the Dragon. An unleashing from the abyss of Revelation chapter 20. Gog and Magog, once actual countries but now spiritually the instruments of the diabolical against the people of God in the final onslaught. We as true believers must endure it. There is no Rapture to save us from what is inevitable. That’s a century old fable. It’s not coming in a shock and awe fashion. It’s subtle. Quiet. It starts with conversations. With these philosophies being taught in our colleges and universities. It ends with division. I’m already experiencing it in my personal life. People who used to worship with me are now against the very faith we loved together. Some have cut off ties with me and no longer want my company. Some have left the Catholic faith to pursue other faiths which celebrate their homosexual lifestyle. It’s about loving your neighbor with your own conception of what love is as opposed to what is hard wired in you. Knowledge means nothing. There is no hell therefore there is no consequence. No judgment. “Do not judge” is the only commandment they preach while rejecting all the others. Everything is salad picked. The poorly formed in the faith receive sacrilegious Holy Communion reaping judgement on themselves like St. Paul speaks about (1 Corinthians 11:27). Millions of future citizens of Heaven are being prevented from being created via contraception. Millions of others that are created are being slaughtered in the womb out of sake of convenience. Jesus as the ONLY God and creator is being thrown into the mix of founders of other faiths…a soup of confusion and relativistic jargon. You can salad pick whoever you want to worship because it’s all the same. The old are being killed for the same reason the unborn are…convenience disguised as mercy. The serpent was right…we have become as gods. We have determined on our own what is good and evil by own standards, rejecting what the True God has revealed. Rejecting Him. This is the core of Rebellion. The core of Pride. The core of Freemasonry. The core of Modern Day Satanism. The core of indifferentism. The fallen angels are relentless. Every day souls are separated from their bodies at death and many fall as snowflakes to Hell, just as the visionaries at Fatima witnessed. The destruction of the human race is the goal of the diabolical. Reason? We were made not only for God’s glory but to actually share in His Glory. His essence. His Life. The Highest Life. Eden isn’t about gardens and fields and sunshine. Eden is about Oneness with Him. What is real. And we’re rejecting it. All for 70 to 100 years tops of self- preservation in whatever moral code we want to make up. The Catholic faith and some separated Christian brethren are the only obstacles to this evil plan. And we WILL be attacked. We already are.
And the youth. The youth….
I keep going back to them. My heart goes out to them. No fathers in the house anymore. Boys feminized and girls masculinized. Roles are twisted and confused. Instead of the One True God of the Faith and of the Word, they are being exposed to the god of this world in the form of rainbow flags and socialist philosophies disguised as justice for all and equal rights. Lies. All lies. The school systems fail for there is no moral code even among administrators who only starve for power at the expense of others. Youth groups in churches are becoming scarce.
It’s going to accumulate eventually to the following moment:
“When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, He will sit upon His glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before Him, and He separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…..And He will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world…Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels….” (Matthew 25—-Read the whole chapter to understand what the saved and damned did and not do to go to their places).
“I saw the dead, the great and the lowly, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened. Then another scroll was opened, the book of life. The dead were judged according to their deeds, by what was written in the scrolls…All the dead were judged according to their deeds. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the pool of fire (This pool of fire is the Second Death). Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the pool of fire.
(Revelation 20:12-15)
At the end of all things, when the end of all things come, we have a choice between everlasting life and everlasting death. Whether we are alive to see the Second Coming or not is irrelevant. We will be at the final General Judgment where it will all be laid bare. What will we tell God then? How will we answer? At that moment we will know as we are known and there will be no arguments there. No debates. Time and space will give way to eternity and there will be no changing of neither the mind nor the clock for the clocks will be obsolete and the mind will be set to our wills. Our choices are here and now. In time and space we can choose. As we leave it our choices become permanent. What’s it worth? I know I will make more enemies than friends in this writing due to the strong tone of supposed “judgment”. There will be people that won’t get it…taken in by the lie that I am being bigoted and hateful. I think I’m ready to take that now. I think I am.
This is the age anti-Christianity. We need to pray and take action. The kind of action I speak of here requires learning. It requires learning of the Faith of Jesus Christ. Who is He? Why did He die for our sins and set us free from the dominion of Satan? Why is this happening right now? Can I endure this dark time? Read catholic apologetic books. The works of Scott Hahn, Peter Kreeft, David Currie. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Learn why we believe what we believe as Catholics. Do not try to win arguments. Try to witness to the Truth. The Truth at the end is all that counts in whatever shapes or forms. Pray the Rosary…I have to admit I struggle with my time management on this one, but it is indeed the great weapon against the Dragon. Pray for each other. Serve each other. In words and in actions. It is what we choose to do here and now that will determine the fate of the Body of Christ not only in the Western world, but on the face of the planet itself. The Birth pains are beginning. With each contraction comes closer the time of fulfillment. The sheep is surely being separated from the goats. The Wheat from the Shaff. The branches on the Vine that does not produce good fruit from the branches that do. We must be witnesses to this…even if it means losing credibility with those we love. Jesus made it clear that divisions would happen due to His coming (Luke 12:51). The reason why anti-Catholicism is rampant is because Satan is rampant. He hates the Catholic Church. He hates Her Groom. He hates the Groom’s Mother…the Woman prophesied in Genesis 3. The attack is relentless. The attack is diabolical. It’s coming on all sides. The sexual abuse. The demolition of the Moral code with the heart of people. The alarm needs to be sounded.
By Rafael Perez
Rev21Films
© 2019, Anthony Stine. All rights reserved. You may reuse or copy this post by giving credit and providing a link.
