In reference to my ‘snakes in paradise’, it turns out that the presence of said snake was prophesied, of sorts, by our own Paula Adamick in her insightful article on Ireland’s sad descent back in June, 2018. Re-reading her essay opens one’s eyes to how far the mighty in faith might fall, once they give up the practice thereof. For once the faith goes, so does reason, natural law, the protection of the innocent, and all hell is quite literally let loose. All those simple things – bread, wine, the consecrating and absolving words of the priest – are the sacramental means by which God gives us Himself and His very life. We – not just the tragic Irish – disdain them at our peril.
As one friend recently wrote to me, I’m convinced that it is the Holy Mass that holds back the world from utter chaos, as it remedies world-wide possession of communities and nations. But as the potency of the Mass is weakened things will get stranger and stranger.
And things are getting strange indeed, with many now seemingly ‘possessed’ by spirits beyond themselves – for how else does one explain what evils which so many not only tolerate, but in which they even rejoice?
Of course, the Mass – that radiant, spiritual nuclear inferno of divine power and grace – can never lose its ‘potency’ which, as the sacrifice of Christ and His Real Presence, is of infinite power; but it is a hidden power, as was Christ’s, and its potency for us may be obscured, by such things as liturgical laxity or abuse, along with our own lack of devotion and participation.
And most just ignore the whole thing. A young priest friend – a former student – mentioned that he has four or five people at daily Mass, all septuagenarians, and just over a hundred or so on Sunday; and this in a town of three thousand souls. But his Mass is still the Mass, and its efficacy, in ways oft unknown to us, inevitable and incontrovertible.
Would that we could repeat the exclamation of Saint Peter to Christ in the Gospel we read the other day, ‘Everyone is looking for you!’. But so few are, at least explicitly; for so many search for Him, in some unwitting ways, in all the wrong places, in hedonism, libertinism, agnosticism, abortion, euthanasia, as the Irish now are, where they will only find His anti-image – the anti-Christ, emptiness, desolation and despair.
The ‘two ways’ – the way of life and the way of death – of which Moses, Christ and His Apostles speak, are now diverging more clearly. We must all make our choice, and seek Christ where He really is, and while He may yet be found. For the time is short, and seems to be getting shorter.
For if we are not with Christ, then we are….well, you know the rest.