Pope Benedict's Warning

And: The Parable Of Narada

Yesterday was such a hard day that I don’t want to dwell too much on the events in Rome. However, attention must be paid. It’s awful to have to do it right here at Christmas, but the seriousness of events is not lessened because it is more difficult to pay attention to them, owing to the season. The Church — not just the Catholics, but also the entire church — suffered a massive defeat yesterday in the culture war, with Pope Francis’s formal permission to bless gay couples. Forget what the Mottramists (see below) are saying: this is a big deal. Here’s one priest who gets it:

And here’s an ex-Catholic who sees with laser-like clarity:

The people who focus on a close reading of the words in the Church’s new document are correct that Francis explicitly denies that same-sex coupling is equivalent to marriage. But they are missing the forest for the trees. This is part of a process of normalizing homosexuality within the Catholic Church. And Francis has done this in precisely the way Skojec (and others) say.

I have more than once felt thankful that God led me to Orthodoxy, but this morning I was praying for James, Luca, Father B., Jason, Kale, and all my other friends who are suffering now as Catholics, and man, my heart is grieved. I literally write this with tears in my eyes. These men are all better Christians than I am, and now this rotten pope is tormenting them, and tearing down the Catholic Church. As I never tire of saying, because it is true: we non-Catholic Christians who live in the West can take no pleasure in this, because the Catholic Church, historically, is the West, and if we lose her, as we are doing, we are all going to suffer greatly. This was not the case in the 16th century, but it is the case in the 21st. I expect that we Orthodox, who have valid sacraments according to Catholic theology, will see an influx of Catholics who have been driven out of their communion by all this. They will find welcome and respite — whatever the faults of our episcopate, they’re not actively trying to queer the faith and make it conform to Babylon’s standards — but even if we doubled in size, the Orthodox Church is tiny in the West, and not big enough to stop the descent of the entire culture.

Rome’s capitulation to the spirit of the age on homosexuality is a world-historical event. You must know this. You must know that we are at war. Some of the more savvy orthodox Catholic commentators online have pointed out that the claim that Francis hasn’t sanctioned same-sex marriage — true, if you read the fine print — or even blessing same-sex couples per se, are suckers in a familiar Francis con. The Catholic scholar and poet James Matthew Wilson gets it:

I laughed at Maclin Horton’s definition of “the new Mottramism” in the comments here yesterday. Rex Mottram is a nitwit character in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a young Canadian businessman who is converting to Catholicism to marry Julia. The priest who is instructing him complains about how dim Mottram is. Father tries to explain what powers Catholics believe the pope has, and Mottram gives a crackpot answer, along the lines of what Mac Horton says here:

The new Mottramism:

Priest: "But if the pope were to pee on your foot and tell you it's raining?"

Rex Mottram: "I suppose I should say that the moisture on my foot is a remarkably localized rain shower, and that it only seems to smell funny because my nose is not spiritual enough."

I haven’t used the word “Mottramist” in polemics since the early days of the abuse scandal, when Mark Shea, who is now a deranged Francis fanboy, used to explain away every failure of Pope John Paul II to deal with this hideous sexual corruption in the clergy by saying that JP2 must have a secret plan to win the war on clerical sodomy, or something. It is quite a comment on human nature that over two decades of scandal, Mottramism is alive and well among some Catholics, who cannot bear the thought that what is happening, is happening.

We Christians outside the Catholic Church who hold to Biblical orthodoxy on human sexuality, including homosexuality, have to pray for our Catholic brothers and sisters — and resolve to fight against the same forces within our own churches (e.g., in the US, the Greek Orthodox archbishop is pro-LGBT, and trying to move the Church towards accommodation with Babylon). What Francis is doing here is part of the abolition of man. It might seem like a tiny concession to homosexuals in the Church, but for reasons I have explained, this is the wedge through which full-on same-sex marriage will be introduced, once the Catholic people have become accustomed to seeing gay couples blessed by Father in the church. And as I have also explained, the only way homosexuality can be reconciled with small-o orthodox Christianity is by flat-out denial of the Bible and nearly 2000 years of tradition. To get to the point, affirming homosexual behavior requires denying Christian anthropology. A Catholic priest wrote to me yesterday to point out that in fact the Bible’s stance on homosex, and on sexuality in general, really is at the heart of the faith. He wrote:

"Ordered sexuality" is at the core of Christianity. Eph 5:31-32 gives us the key to Gen 2:24 and hence the key to God's works of creation and salvation. St. Paul says that the ordering of sexual differentiation in the human race to the "two becoming one body" in monogamous marriage is based on the union of Christ and the Church. Now, within the creation stories of Gen 1 and 2, the entire created order finds its pinnacle (Gen 1) or center (Gen 2) in the creation of the man/husband and woman/wife united in a marriage existing within their fellowship with God. St. Paul is thus telling us that the union of Christ and the Church is the blueprint for the creation and ordering of the entire cosmos as well as for the ordering of creation to salvation through the Eternal Covenant. The creation of Adam and Eve as husband and wife manifests the plan of salvation and hence is the first proclamation of the Gospel. It is THE foundational expression of the mystery which is present from the beginning (though its full meaning hidden), has been revealed in Christ and the Church, and will be brought to fulfillment in the Wedding feast of the Lamb. 

When God said "Let there be light" he was shaping all things so that creation and the human race could find a transcendent fulfillment in the union of the Incarnate Logos and his Body and Bride in the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no Eternal Covenant, and hence no Christianity, cosmos, or sexually differentiated human race without Christ and the Church. You can't get closer to the core than that because that is the "core" or "heart" of all things.

There's no "risk" of losing the integrity of the faith when ordered sexuality is overthrown because  the disintegration of the faith is then already accomplished.

The lost awareness of the Christ-Church ordering of the cosmos is the so-called disenchantment that befell Western cultures.

This is wisdom, and I’m grateful to this priest for his words. I wish I could tell you who he is and where he ministers; his parish will undoubtedly be a haven from the madness. I know him well enough to know that he will never, ever capitulate. Take the core lesson here: the destruction of Judeo-Christian anthropology — that is, what the human being, created in the image of God, is — means the destruction of Christianity. That is what we are living through. That is the meaning of the re-paganization of formerly Christian society by the sexual mores of the Roman Empire, and even the capture of the minds of the Roman church’s leadership class by these lies.

Another reader wrote yesterday to point out that contrary to my claim, the Bible does speak, indirectly, about transgenderism. I would have assumed that based on “male and female he created them,” any attempt to muddy that would be against the revealed cosmic order, and therefore sinful. The reader points out that Ezekiel 5:8-14 can be read as a prophetic rebuke of disordered sexuality. In Ezekiel 8, the Lord tells the prophet that He is going to judge Israel for religious idolatry, in particular worship of the Sumerian god Tammuz, who was the primary consort of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of fertility. As I wrote late last year in this TAC blog post, the Protestant pastor Jonathan Cahn teaches (persuasively, in my view) that we in the modern West have welcomed the old Mesopotamian gods back — including Ishtar. Excerpt from that November 2022 post:

But Cahn argues that these deities -- as demonic spiritual entities -- did not cease to exist. In fact, he argues that they are coming back under different names, or under no particular theological name at all. He says that the de-Christianization of our society in the twentieth century has brought back all the old demons, and many more. Return Of The Gods centers on Cahn's belief that three particular Ancient Near East gods -- Baal, Ishtar, and Molech -- have now been enthroned, in some sense, over the post-Christian West -- and that the West (the United States in particular) is going to face the same fate as ancient Israel when it whored after false gods. It's a more compelling case than you might expect.

(Again, I caution you that I don't know about Ancient Near Eastern religion, so I can't vouch for the claims Jonathan Cahn makes, except for the few I researched myself. I welcome correction if Cahn, or I, have gotten something wrong.)

… The second -- and most interesting -- god in Cahn's book is Ishtar (Astarte/Ashtoreth/Venus/Inanna), the Babylonian goddess of love, pictured above. She was the goddess of sacred prostitution, of transgression, and the blurring of boundaries. Did you know that she was also the goddess of gender fluidity? I thought that was too on the nose to be true, but it is. This is easy to discover from authoritative sources online, but here's a very short bit from Psychology Today:

The Mesopotamian Ishtar, the beautiful goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex, was sometimes represented with a beard to emphasize her more bellicose side. She could change a man into a woman, and the assinnu, kurgarru, and kuku’u who performed her cult had both male and female features.

Cahn asks what it would mean for America to fall into the worship of Ishtar?

We would expect a transformation to begin that would alter the realm of sexuality. With the goddess's entrance we would expect biblical standards and ethics surrounding sexuality and marriage to begin to erode. We would expect the moral foundations and values that had undergirded Western civilization for nearly two thousand years to begin overturning.

In short, we would expect there to be a revolution in the realm of sexuality -- a sexual revolution.

More:

Not only did Ishtar introduce, promulgate, and champion sexual immorality -- she sanctified it; she declared it holy. Sexually immoral acts were part of her cult and worship, performed as rites in her temples and shrines. So in the grip of her spirit, the same thing began manifesting in American and Western culture. Sexual immorality was now not only accepted but treated as sacred.

Now it was the former standards and restraints that were seen as sinful, puritanical, repressive, and evil. And the one who opposed the newly sanctified sins or failed to adequately revere them was now treated as something of a heretic, and the opposition to the new morality as something akin to blasphemy.

What the spirit of Baal had begun, the spirit of Ashtoreth, or Ishtar, had taken to another level. The work of each god was to bring about the inversion of civilization. Ishtar had inverted the realm of sexuality. She had taken what was forbidden, unspoken, and taboo and, step-by-step, introduced it into the mainstream culture. The shock of each step would be followed by familiarity and numbness, then toleration, then acceptance, then celebration.

Cahn says the third false good of his "Dark Trinity" is Molech, the god to whom people in the Ancient Near East sacrificed children. They sacrificed these children for the sake of achieving blessing, including prosperity, from the god. Cahn correctly links this to abortion, and to Ishtar's rites -- that is, unwanted children conceived by Ishtar-worshippers could be offered to Molech. It is no accident, says the pastor, that Planned Parenthood is not only the go-to place for abortions, but also the go-to place to get cross-sex hormones to change your sex -- which, of course, renders you infertile. It's all a death cult.

The Ishtar material in this book is amazing. Cahn quotes a Hittite hymn to the goddess describing her as the one who will "...grind away from men manliness." There was a prayer to her praising her power to emasculate and feminize men (Cahn footnotes these, citing academic articles, but I couldn't find an online link). He cites NYU archaeologist Zainab Bahrani's scholarly book Women of Babylon as saying Ishtar's nature was to "destroy masculinity" and to work, in effect, "destruction of the cultural order." Another writer says:

Additionally, Inanna [Another name of Ishtar -- RD] is depicted as embodying both male and female qualities. She says, ‘Though I am a woman I am a noble young man..’ (24) Her androgyny is attested to in her cultic personnel, which included eunuchs and transvestites and during her festival young men carried hoops, a feminine symbol, while young women carried swords.  The(25) In-nin-sa-gur-ra says, ‘She (Ishtar) [changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female), she [changes] the left side into the right side, she [turns] a man into a woman, she [turns] a woman into a man, she ador[ns] a man as a woman, she ador[ns] a woman as a man.’  For Sjoberg this merely refers to the changing roles of men and women in cult ceremonies, but given the world-turned-upside-down nature of her cultic festivities an element of gender role reversal does not seem unfeasible. As Harris says, Inanna was ‘a deity who incorporated fundamental and irreducible paradoxes.’ She argues that through her embodiment of these opposing qualities she  succeeded in transcending them.

Cahn says, sensibly, that if Ishtar worship came to America, we would expect to see the feminization of males and the masculinization of females, and overall gender confusion. Well... .

Now, yesterday, my Catholic reader and friend wrote to point out this judgment of God on Israel, chiefly for mixing pagan worship — of Tammuz, in particular — with worship of the true God. This is Ezekiel 5:8-14:

8 “Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. 9 Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again. 10 Therefore in your midst parents will eat their children, and children will eat their parents. I will inflict punishment on you and will scatter all your survivors to the winds. 11 Therefore as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your vile images and detestable practices, I myself will shave you; I will not look on you with pity or spare you. 12 A third of your people will die of the plague or perish by famine inside you; a third will fall by the sword outside your walls; and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.

13 “Then my anger will cease and my wrath against them will subside, and I will be avenged. And when I have spent my wrath on them, they will know that I the Lord have spoken in my zeal.

14 “I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations around you, in the sight of all who pass by. 15 You will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke. I the Lord have spoken. 16 When I shoot at you with my deadly and destructive arrows of famine, I will shoot to destroy you. I will bring more and more famine upon you and cut off your supply of food. 17 I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will leave you childless. Plague and bloodshed will sweep through you, and I will bring the sword against you. I the Lord have spoken.”

Pope Francis and his minions are doing what the ancient Israelites did. The United States, as a nation, is doing the same kind of thing (read Cahn’s book The Return Of The Gods to learn more). We are going to be judged, and judged harshly, for this. The judgment is going to fall on the just and the unjust alike. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote to Vlado Palko in 2015, in a letter congratulating him on his book warning about coming persecution of Christians in Europe:

"We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil."

The power of the Antichrist has only grown since the holy pope emeritus wrote those words. Now is not a time to freak out. It is a time to assess the situation soberly, and rally to “strong shepherds” wherever you find them — and they won’t always be in vestments. Be a strong shepherd for your family, and for those around you, as you are able.

You might wish to read this intriguing commentary about Ratzinger and the End Times, by the Vaticanist Marco Tosatti. In it, he analyzes a 2009 address by then-Pope Benedict, who favorably cited the writings of the fourth century theologian Tyconius. Tyconius predicted that in the Last Days, there would be a fateful division in the Church, in which the faithful — the true church — would leave the apostate church. Tosatti goes on to discuss what those who had seen the Third Secret of Fatima have said: that it involves apostasy in the Church, starting at the very top. Tosatti then concludes that Benedict’s strange resignation might have been motivated by Ratzinger’s conclusion that in order to save the true church, he needed to stand aside to cease being a katechon holding back the events leading to the purification:

And, if so, has he realized that, as Pope, he has had to initiate the “withdrawal” of the true Church from the false so as to inaugurate the great apostasy and begin the exposure of the false brethren who have infiltrated the Church to the highest of levels?

If this interpretation is true, then we should understand that what is happening now has to happen. It was foretold. Catholics and all other Christians can bear this apostasy and coming persecution, because we know that it has meaning. We can grasp that we may well be the people who have been fated to live in the times prophesied 2,000 years ago. In 1976, a Catholic bishop said:

We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced. I do not think that the wide circle of the American Society, or the whole wide circle of the Christian Community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the gospel and the anti-gospel, between Christ and the Antichrist. The confrontation lies within the plans of Divine Providence. It is, therefore, in God’s Plan, and it must be a trial which the Church must take up, and face courageously.

That bishop was Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow, speaking at a Eucharistic congress in Philadelphia. As you know, he became Pope St. John Paul II. Even before he was pope, he counseled that these trials are meant for us, and that we have to face them with courage. If you are Catholic, let that comfort and strengthen you on this day. If you are a Christian but not Catholic, keep these words in mind, and know through faith that the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed (Rev. 5:5), and that even if they kill us, we have nothing to fear as long as we stay united to Him.

Last word: this column from yesterday, by my friend Gavin Ashenden (a former prominent Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism) is one of the best things I’ve read about the crisis Francis initiated yesterday. Excerpt:

The liberal theologians have made a disastrous category error. The rope that they massage and pull so lovingly has at the other end a noose that will be used to persecute Christians and drive them out of the public square and worse. The placation of same-sex erotic attraction at the hands of the liberal elite has become a weapon of Christian destruction at the hands of social activists.

There are Christians maintaining their belief in the Bible and the Magisterium who when asked about their definition of marriage and sexual ethics are then being turned into social outcasts. They experience losing jobs, being cancelled on social media, and in the case of one evangelical school teacher in Northern Ireland, being incarcerated in jail.

The second argument is well summarised by a recent remark to the Catholic Herald by Bishop Schneider. No one will die for ambiguity and uncertainty. Liberal and progressive Christianity, whatever placation of secular sensibility it offers, makes no converts. And no one will sacrifice themselves for it. If the blood the martyrs is the seed of the Church, the ambiguity of the progressives is the death of the Church.

Catholics are being placed in an impossible and profoundly uncomfortable position by the Vatican; that of remaining good Catholics and knowing that they fuel the death of the Faith; or risking being bad Catholics in order to be faithful to Jesus and, by their sacrifice and witness, keeping the Church alive.

What is true for Catholics is true to some extent for all faithful Christians today. It’s why I wrote The Benedict Option — which, I remind you, Benedict XVI endorsed through the words of his secretary Archbishop Gänswein — and Live Not By Lies. This is the challenge laid out before us. Most of us will fail to meet it. You are not chiefly responsible for others. You are chiefly responsible for yourself. How will you respond? The next item has some wisdom for us all.

The Parable Of Narada

My friend Martin Shaw gave me a copy of A Hut At The Edge Of The Village, a collection of writing from the late John Moriarty, which he (Shaw) edited. (Here’s a recording of a talk from Moriarty, who died in 2007.) Yesterday I was reading it, and came across an extraordinary passage in which Moriarty recalled walking home from the pub in the darkness, accompanying a drunk friend named Martin. The passage ends like this, with Moriarty’s meditation on foidin mearai, a Celtic concept referring to a piece of fairy-enchanted ground onto which, if one steps, one is reduced to confusion:

Is the whole world, I wondered, a foidin mearai? Is every lobs of the human mind, dreaming and waking, a foidin mearai, And the easy assurance we almost always have of knowing where we are in terms of our whereabouts, is that, because it is so unsuspected, the most serious of all our bewilderments? …

Lying there, too frightened to fall asleep, I calmed and consoled myself with a Hindu parable:

Narada was a solitary. So altruistically motivated was he in his long and perilous quest for the Truth, that one day it was Vishnu the great God, the great Mayin himself, who was standing at his door.

“Conscious of all that you have endured on behalf of all things,” Vishnu said, “I have come to grant you the boon of your choice.”

“The only boon I have ever wished for,” Narada replied, “is to understand the secret of your maya [in Hinduism, a magic power through which a god can make people believe in an illusion]. It will please me, Holy One, if you show me the source, and the power over us, of the World illusion.”

As if to dissuade him, Vishnu smiled, strangely. But, having named his boon, Narada remained silent.

“Come with me,” Vishnu said, his strange smile not fading. Before long the arid land they were walking in had turned into a terrible, red desert. Moisture in their mouths was turning to ashes. Like the cracked rocks their minds were cracking.

Claiming he could go no farther, Vishnu sat down.

Seeking water for his God, Narada struggled on. To his great delight the desert gave way to scrubland, the scrubland gave way to sown land and then, in a valley below him, there it was, a lovely green village.

He knocked on the first door. So enchantingly beautiful was the young woman who opened it that he instantly and entirely forgot what it was he had come for. It was strange. As if this house had always been his home he sat and ate with the family. Early next morning he was working in their fields with them. At seed-sowing he worked. At harvest he worked. In the quiet time between seasons he asked her father if he might have the young woman’s hand in marriage. Three children were born to them, and when the old man died Narada became head of the household.

One year the monsoon rains were like the rains at the end of a world. Night or day there was no let up. The river burst its banks and struggling one night to reach the safety of the higher ground, Narada’s wife was swept away. Wailings in the chaos of the waters was the last he heard of his three children. He was swept away himself but, miraculously, not to drowning. He was sitting on a hill. So terrible and red was the glare he couldn’t open his eyes. Moisture in his mouth was turning to ashes. Like the cracked rocks, his sanity was cracking. Then, from behind him, he heard a voice, familiar but enigmatic: “I’ve been waiting for almost a half an hour now, did you bring the water?”

Moriarty continues:

The spell was broken and now, like the skull at the foot of the cross, I could hear the God, himself crucified, asking the question:

“I thirst. Did you bring the water?”

That hit me hard. The meaning is this: the idea that we can ever achieve permanent happiness is an illusion. Indeed, in our happiness, we can forget our duties to God, and to showing compassion for all. In the end, all that we love and rejoice in can be swept away. What we are left with is our duty to God, and to showing mercy to our fellow sufferers — including God. (Moriarty cites one of Jesus’s words from the Cross: “I thirst.”)

That spoke deeply to my heart yesterday, mourning as I am now, especially at Christmastime, the loss of almost everything that gave my life meaning, and that gave me happiness: my Louisiana family, and subsequently my marriage and my own family. All that’s left right now is my son Matt and me — and my faith. What the parable says — and though a Hindu parable, its consonance with Christianity is plain — is that the only things that are permanent are the transience of life in this world, God’s unfailing presence with us on the pilgrim’s path through this life, and our obligation to serve Him, even as He suffers with us. It is important to understand that as Christians, we believe that God, the maker of the cosmos, condescended to become incarnate, and suffer as we do, even more severely than almost all of us will. Humiliated, beaten, and nailed to a cross like a common criminal, our God said, “I thirst.”

Will we bring him water? It could be that lost in our dream of a perfect world, we forgot Him, and we forgot the reality of suffering — and our obligation to comfort those who mourn, and who suffer. The power of Vishnu’s maya, then, lies in our own desire to forget that life is hard, and that we need God. Our god doesn’t “need” us, technically speaking, but He wants us. He wants us to love Him, and to allow Him to love us, and to share our life.

I did not choose this suffering that has come to me. In fact, I thought when I went back to Louisiana in 2011 that I was entering a “lovely green village,” like Narada. To be honest, I entered the lovely green village when I married in 1997. But amid the blessing, a storm came, and swept nearly all of it away. Now, with my green village having been washed away, I live in a desert, with the moisture in my mouth turning to ashes … but there is Jesus, and He thirsts.

What a gift this parable was. I know through faith that my Redeemer liveth, and so do you Christians. If you are a Catholic, then your little green village in which you have dwelled for so long, happily, is being swept away by the flood of liquid modernity. You have been living, perhaps, in Palm Sunday, when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem to the acclaim of the crowds. But within days, the crowd turned into a mob, and even the High Priest and the senior clergy turned on the Messiah of Israel. They destroyed everything, even the life of Jesus of Nazareth. God Himself chose to share in our suffering to the utmost degree, even unto death.

And He defeated death! We can know from this that death will not have the final word. That the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed. We cannot avoid suffering — even in the lives of the righteous, even in the life of the Son of God, very bad things can happen — but we can know that Emmanuel (“God is with us”) stands at our side, thirsting with us. Our own suffering is a call to stronger faith, and to giving mercy.

This strengthens me, this uplifts me, and this challenges me to do more. It is better to live in the parched desert with Jesus than to live richly in a green village without Him. It could be, and likely is, that our comfort has caused the memory of Him, and His suffering, to grow dim in our mind’s eye. If so, then for Catholics, this catastrophe that has befallen their Church could be a blessing, if received rightly. For all of us, the great falling-away we see from the faith worldwide could be the dying before resurrection. All the pain, all the loneliness, all the regret that we carry on our backs — it can be for our own conversion, our own purification. The little green village was Narada’s idea of heaven on earth — but it was an illusion, as all things in this mortal life are. Family, home, and prosperity are not bad things, unless they cause us to forget God, and to forget the call to mercy.

I could not stop the bad things that happened to me over the past eleven years. But I can control my reaction to them. You Catholics, you cannot control what Pope Francis and his henchmen do. But you can control your reaction to them. Personally, I hope that some of you find your way into Orthodoxy, which I believe is true. But even if you come to Orthodoxy, you must understand that you are not leaving the desert for a little green village. You are leaving for a surer and straighter path through the desert, with Our Lord, who thirsts. You should know, though, that it matters far more to me, an Orthodox, that you know and follow Jesus, wherever you are. Whether you stay Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, please know that all Christians have entered a time of general apostasy, a terrible trial, and probably the one that Scripture told us would come one day. There is no escape from it, not in any visible church. There is only faithful endurance. We need each other, all of us, whatever our communion.

Remember what Father Cassian, the founding prior of the Norcia monastery, told me in 2015: that any Christian who wants to make it through what’s coming needs to find some sort of Benedict Option community. Not just Catholics; any Christian. If you don’t have one, then consider that it might be your calling to found one. As I’ve said many times here, one of the most important lessons I learned from the Christians who stayed behind in the Communist east, and withstood persecution, is the importance of binding yourself to a small group of believers, in whom you can trust.

Courage, my friends! The desert is not where we are meant to live forever. But it’s where we are now. Let us draw closer to God, who shares our suffering as He sees his beloved sheep scattered.