By The Unknown Centurion
There was a time when the Church and its members transformed the world. Through the graces of her sacraments and the countercultural witness of her practitioners the world, over a millennium, had, to a certain extent, been conformed to Christ. Sadly, in these latter days, there has been a reversal, where now the world has transformed the Church, and many of her leaders and members, conforming her closer to the image of its preternatural prince. At a minimum, many in the Church unwittingly accomplish the Enemy’s will, by refusing to stand up, speak out, and actively fight against his multivalent, diabolical schemes that undermine the unchanging Faith of Christ and His Church. Rather than being citizens of heaven (Philippians 3:20) and sojourners on earth (1 Peter 2:11), many Catholics, from top to bottom, have become citizens of the world, virtually indistinguishable from the so-called secular world (i.e. the world) by every metric. The question is – is this a problem, and if so, why aren’t those who know the truth, praying, speaking, and acting with urgency to address it?
In The Beginning
Few of us in the post-Christian world know what time it is, our mission, who the enemies are, and what the stakes are if we succeed or fail. We live in unprecedented times of turmoil and tribulation, yet the vast majority of us, even many within the Church, seem entirely unaware. We continue to whistle down the wide road to ruin when we need to wake up, turn around, and follow Him. For as it was in the beginning, remains true today, perhaps even more so, because our culture is less Christian, and the visible and invisible creatures opposed to God and our salvation are more numerous, powerful, and successful in their attacks on the Kingdom of God, from within and without.
In fact, this spiritual war waged upon us can be traced back to the creation of mankind. Adam was appointed to be the prince of the world, ruling over the material world for the Father who created Him. Though he was given the mission to tend and defend (Genesis 2:15), Adam abdicated his authority, doing nothing and allowing an Ancient Serpent to enter the sacred garden and cause his wife and later him to sin, which eventually corrupted all of creation.
As a result, Satan became the prince of the world (John 12:31; John 14:30; 2 Corinthians 4:4), but God punished the Ancient Serpent by placing eternal enmity between this evil creature and the offspring of the Woman. Enmity means that the prince of the world and the seed of the woman would be totally opposed to each other in constant and complete animosity. At Christ’s Crucifixion, the “woman” became the Mother of the Church, spiritually conceiving the mystical Body of Christ in her pierced heart. And from the moment it was established, the world and its prince have been at war with the Church, as promised by God in Genesis 3:15.
It remains so today, except to a large extent, the Church is no longer at war with the world, due to ignorance, indifference, cowardice, capitulation, or because it has been infiltrated, corrupted, or otherwise assimilated into the world. This enmity between the world and the Church shall continue until Christ returns, as the Apocalypse of John predicts: “Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Revelation 12:7).
In the beginning, the angels fell because they rebelled against doing the will of God. So did humanity because of a similar rebellion by our first parents. We inherited that selfish, rebellious nature through original sin, which cannot be overcome without our choosing to cooperate with God’s grace. Only by realizing our eternal enmity with a fallen world and its prince and rejecting its constant distractions and empty delusions can we truly flourish as God intended, gathering others in our wake.
Belief in the Supernatural
Part of the problem is that modern, material man does not believe in a spiritual realm or the unseen creatures who inhabit it. Contrary to the consistent teaching of the Church since Christ, many today don’t believe in the devil. And many believe that if there even is a hell, only purely evil people like Hitler end up there. Yet, Jesus drives out demons and speaks about hell far more than anyone else in Scripture. Demons are real. They are evil, extremely intelligent, and work without ceasing to keep us from eternal communion with our triune God. And because they have been so successful as of late in corrupting the culture, many of us could end up in hell just by going with the societal flow.
To those who believe in an empty hell and that all we need is to be nice, I have one question: What if you’re wrong? Do you really want to risk it all over an irrational hope contrary to the words of Christ when the costs if you’re wrong are infinitely worse than you could ever possibly imagine? It doesn’t matter that a certain bishop or even a Pope likes to imagine that hell is empty when Jesus, who alone knows, warns us in no uncertain terms that many take the wide road that leads to hell and few take the narrow road that leads to heaven (Matthew 7:13,14).
True, God loves each of us and He wants us all to be saved. But there’s a big difference between God loving us and Him being pleased by us. Those of us who are parents know this well. God loves all His children, but He may not be pleased by the ones who ignore Him, refuse to obey Him, or outright reject Him. The ones who do His will also please Him. “Not every one who says to me, `Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21). At Jesus’ baptism, the Father audibly declared that Jesus was not only beloved, but well pleasing to the Father (Matthew 3:17), because Jesus always did the Father’s will (John 6:38). Remember, Jesus who is our model didn’t pursue an earthly life of comfort, pleasure, affirmation, and self-indulgence; He like us had a mission, to do the Father’s will, which in His case was to suffer and die for the salvation of the world. Remember His command was to take up our crosses and follow Me, not if it feels good, do it, and if doesn’t, don’t do it.
Two Kingdoms
The Bible is clear. There are two and only two kingdoms. Either you belong to the Kingdom of God or the kingdom of the world. There is no dual citizenship or neutrality. Before one can leave one to become a citizen of the other kingdom, he must renounce his original citizenship. This is done by every Christian (or the child’s parents) at baptism. Renouncing one’s citizenship in the Kingdom of God is typically less of a formal ritual. In fact, it often occurs gradually, unintentionally, where the unwitting emigrant is often completely unaware that he has renounced his citizenship in the Kingdom of God and is squarely within the kingdom of the world. Those who live for themselves in pursuit of the fleeting, false fruit of a fallen world, without reference to God or concern for their fellow man are citizens of the world, not members of the Kingdom of God. Being nice, mindful, or an ally of the medalists of the oppression Olympics is not enough to be a citizen in good standing in the Kingdom of God. The requirements for citizenship of the Kingdom of God are striving to follow all He has commanded and seeking to do God’s will above our own.
An old Christian adage paraphrased from the words of Christ ((John 17:15-16) calls us to be in the world but not of the world. I contend that this simple swapping of short prepositions is not enough to guide us to eternal salvation against the Category 5 gale-force headwinds that oppose it. The existence of such adversarial empires of good and evil should not be a secret or a surprise to anyone who has read the Bible. The world and its prince are eternally opposed to our peace, joy, and flourishing in the here and now, and our eternal salvation in the hereafter. A cursory review of the New Testament revealed that such an all-important dichotomy between living for God or for the world was driven home more than twenty-five times. Here are just a handful of examples:
Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God (James 4:4).
If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you (John 15:19).
Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Romans 12:2).
We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one (1 John 5:19).
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever (1 John 2:15-17).
Perhaps it was possible, say in the Thirteenth Century, for a Christian to have one foot in the kingdom of the world and one in the Kingdom of God, but these times are not those times. Cultural Christianity, where the faith of Christ uplifted every culture it encountered, built Western Civilization and permeated people’s lives, had a good run. But the days when almost everyone believed in God, practiced their faith, lived in accordance with its moral tenets, putting God first, others second, and themselves third are long gone. The culture today can be called post-Christian, or perhaps more accurately, anti-Christian. These times call for us to live intentionally, counterculturally, courageously, even heroically, for much of what the current culture calls evil we have always called good, and vice versa. As Pope Benedict wrote, God created us for greatness, not comfort. God made us “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven” (The Baltimore Catechism No. 1). Despite this divine mission and mandate, modern man too often lives to know, love, and serve only himself.
What Now?
So what are some things we do in the Year of our Lord 2024 to be citizens of the Kingdom of God not of the world and its prince?
Rejection – of the world, its inversion of truth and morality, its indoctrination, ideologies, and idolatry, its indifference and ignorance toward God
Repentance – fixing our focus on God and ordering our lives around the sacred rhythms and rituals of the Church, following the way of Christ not the ways of the world, its prince, or our selfish, disordered desires
Reorientation – in outlook and action, giving God, not ourselves, our first and best, and zealously working to bring to Christ the souls in our path for whom He desperately thirsts
Reconciliation – restoring communion with God and others, removing all obstacles to His grace, forgiving and being merciful so that we receive His mercy
Reclamation – of an active, all-encompassing, sacrificial faith, taking responsibility for our relationship with God, and reclaiming the distinctive practices which set us apart from the world, including daily rosaries, weekly abstinence from meat every Friday, frequent works of mercy, monthly confession, annual pilgrimages, processions, and retreats, etc.
Reparation – perform frequent acts of prayer, sacrifice, and self-denial, choosing the lesser and doing the harder in reparation for the increasing, outrages and offenses committed against God
Resistance – resist evil, in all its insidious and alluring forms, the visible and invisible, both from within and without
Risk Everything – life is not meant to be a passive, pleasure-pursuing endeavor and nothing is as important as the salvation of our souls and the souls of our fellow men. We must spend our time zealously accomplishing this sacred mission regardless of the costs through prayer, words, and action
Our Catholic faith, though universal, may not be for everyone today. It doesn’t appeal to the soft and selfish unless we choose to continue to lower the bar and become a worldly, therapeutic institution. It requires selflessness, sacrifice, struggle, suffering and, above all, doing the Father’s will. It’s never been about, (until recently), ease, comfort, pleasure, safety, or doing whatever we want according to our selfish desires and sinful natures without reference to God.
The Kingdom of God doesn’t need any more cowardice, compromise, or capitulation with an Enemy that works tirelessly for our destruction. We need the courage to live counterculturally, choosing to selflessly please God and love our neighbors. What is necessary is for the Holy Spirit to give us the wisdom to know God’s will and the strength and the ardor to accomplish it. Come Holy Spirit!
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