Christus Vincit. Christus Regnat. Christus Imperat.

This last Sunday of the Church Year (Ordinary Form) marks the Feast of Christ the King.

It is a young feast, as the Church counts time.  Pope Pius XI instituted it less than a century ago.  Perhaps this, along with its proximity to Advent, explains why it often gets so little love.  It's always fascinated me.  Most of our feasts commemorate past events:  the deaths of saints, the foundations of basilicas, historic moments like the Transfiguration and Ascension of Our Lord.  Some recall past events while looking forward to future things they signify.  Thus our coming season of Advent/Christmastide recalls Christ's birth and also points toward His Second Coming.  Eastertide and Our Lady's Assumption celebrate those events while also anticipating our own resurrection as a Church and being caught up to meet Our Lord in the clouds on the last day (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4: 17).  And at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday, all history past, present, and future comes together as one, revealing the Cross as the axis upon which it turns.

Today's feast, however, is unique in that it commemorates an event which, from where we now stand in space/time, has not yet happened.  The day when Christ puts all His enemies under His feet, and presents us as a kingdom of priests to the Heavenly Father (cf. 1Cor. 15:  24-25; Rev. 1: 6).

I've needed this feast.  Maybe you have, too.  Have the recent elections had you down?  The state of the world?  A society where we proclaim a national holiday to give thanks for all we have - then get up in the middle of the night to go shopping for more?  Where we smash, and beat, and tear, and draw down on each other for more?

Then this post-holiday holy day may be just the thing for you.  Have no fear.  Do not despair.  Do not be sad.
Christus vincit.  Christus regnat.  Christus Imperat.  Christ has conquered.  Christ rules.  Christ commands.

Have no fear.  Thirty-four years ago, Blessed John Paul II began his papacy with those words:  Nolite Temere!  "Be Not Afraid!"  He returned to that theme again and again down the years, as in Crossing the Threshold of Hope:  "Do not be afraid to follow Christ!"  "Do not be afraid of men!"

"The Lord is King; He is robed in majesty!"  This is our refrain in today's Psalm.  Sing it loud!  Sing it with confidence!  "Take heart," says the Lord; "I have overcome the world." (John 16: 33)  Sing Alleluia!  Sing Hosanna!  Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord!  Blessed is the Kingdom of our father David that is coming! (Mk. 11: 10)

The world may think it's won.  Let it go on thinking that.  The prince of this world is already judged.  Christus vincit.  Christus regnat.  Christus imperat.  This is why today's Gospel reading doesn't show Jesus smacking down a demon, or calming the winds and the sea, or telling the Pharisees where to get off.  It shows him before Pilate, as king and conqueror, at the end of the eighteenth chapter of John's Gospel.  The "you say it," form of His answer may seem unclear, but  Christ is indeed King.  King of the Universe.  If you don't believe that, get your Bible and read what comes immediately after this scene.  Jesus has affirmed His Kingship.  Pilate's men then dress him in purple and pleat him a crown.  Pilate then brings Him out before the people:  "Behold your king!"

At the end of Chapter 18, Pilate had asked Our Lord, "What is truth," but now he can't seem to help but proclaim it.  Later, he will put it in writing, and when challenged, he will say, Quod scripsi, scripsi - "What I have written, I have written."

The people may beg to differ.  "Give us Barabbas!" they say.  Like Black Friday mobs (and a Black Friday it looked indeed), they crowded and pushed, and rushed the Praetorium gates.  "Away with this man!  We have no king but Caesar!"  So much for popular opinion.  Nevertheless, the king has been crowned by lawful authority, presented to His people.  Now He goes to be enthroned upon His Cross.

Charlie Sheen notwithstanding, THIS is what winning looks like.

The Lamb of God is the Lion of Judah, and the Wood of the Cross is the Tree of Life.  In Hoc Signo Vinces - "In this sign, you will conquer."  

Christus vincit. Christus regnat. Christus imperat.

Nolite Timere.

Evangelize. Now. Or Die.

And so, the verdict is in.  A majority of Americans, and a majority of Catholic Americans, has re-elected a regime that has mandated the faithful to fund infanticide, sacralized sodomy, and is poised to drive religion, not only from the public square, but from health care, education, and charity work as well.

Fedora-tip to Mark Shea for this image.

If you're within shouting distance of my generation, you may remember watching the Berlin Wall come down in 1989.  Like me, you may very well have rejoiced that the Cold War was finally over.

Bet you didn't realize we'd lost.  I know I didn't.

When President Obama said that America was no longer a Christian nation, we called it an outrageous lie.  In fact, the president was merely telling us, correctly, what time it was.

It is twilight - evening in America.

Welcome to the Great Rude Awakening.  We are no longer a center-right nation that values hard work and fair play.  We are now a center-left nation that values fair work and hard play.  Religion is the new porn, and vice versa.  Life begins when you're old enough to vote, and ends when you're voted off the island.  Individualism is selfishness, the Gospel is hate speech, and self-denial is genocide.

Welcome to the United Soviet States of America.

And it's all the will of the people.  Vox populi, vox diaboli.  The "silent majority" that gave Nixon his landslide forty years ago, that gave Reagan his mandate thirty years ago?  A lot of them are dead now, and their descendants do not share their fathers' values.  We are a minority.  Not even a minority.  We are a small fringe that makes up part of a minority, together with libertarians, hard-money activists, protectionists, Ayn Randians, military adventurers, and yes, sad to say, even a few white supremacists.  Even if we somehow take back the reins of power, what could we do?  Ban abortion and gay marriage, drive the social engineers out of our schools and replace them with effective teachers, re-establish blue laws to encourage church attendance?  How?  How do you enforce a law, however just, that most of society doesn't want and will not back up?  Look at Prohibition.  There's no way to enact such laws without becoming the dictatorial police state we most fear.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops must be in a similar quandary.  The conference goes into its Fall General Assembly next week knowing that more than half its flock are giving it the finger and are de facto apostates and/or schismatics who will drop the name of Catholic the minute it works to their disadvantage.  It would seem that the bishops must either put in their teeth and start laying down the law, or resign themselves to being not so much a prophetic voice in the wilderness as a tree falling in the forest that no one hears.

Locutus, president of catholicsforchoice.borg

So what to do?  Politically, we're beaten; it's hopeless.  I'm not saying we shouldn't still vote.  I'm not saying we should turn our backs on society, retreat to our Catholic ghettos of old, and wait for the Huns to arrive and start Middle Ages II.  For one thing, the Visigoths and Vandals are already here.  They're us.  Without the sanctifying grace of Christ and His Church, we're devolving back into the barbarian hordes our ancestors were.

What I am saying is that we can't count on mere politics to save us anymore.  At best, a Romney administration would have only been a stop-gap, while we worked on building permanent solutions.  Like Original Sin or falling down a well, we got ourselves into this mess, but that doesn't mean we can get ourselves out.

If we want to save our country, our society, our civilization, there's only one move left open to us:

Do I mean preaching on street corners?  Only if you're good at it.  The world has heard all the sermons.  It's heard all the apologetics.  It's ready to deny and ignore them all.  But one thing it can't ignore is personal holiness.  For most of us, it means random acts of kindness.  The corporal and spiritual works of mercy.  Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven" (Mt. 5: 16).  We must be prepared to jack up our prayer life, and to make spiritual sacrifices and self-mortifications, for "this kind cannot be driven out by anything except prayer and fasting" (Mk. 9: 29).  We need to live close to the sacraments, so that they'll see we've been with Jesus.

That above all.  Get.  With.  Christ.  Read his love letters in the Scriptures.  Visit Him in Eucharistic Adoration.  If your parish doesn't have a Perpetual Adoration chapel, adore Him in the tabernacle.  If you can see Him through the accidents of bread and wine, a couple of metal doors should be no problem.

Get with His Mother, too.  She was the first evangelist, as Mother Theresa tells us, because the first thing she did after she received Christ was to bring him to St. Elizabeth in the Visitation.  The Rosary is Our Lady's lasso.  It has roped more souls into heaven than even the angels could count.

Bishop Sheen (forty years ago, no less!) predicted that the postmodern Church was like Gideon's army in Judges 7.  Christ is thinning his ranks, telling the cowards and the comfortable to go home.  We may be few, but He is with us:  "The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still" (Ex. 14: 14).

And for God's sake, be joyful!  Don't get into arguments.  Don't get mad at your enemies.  Pity them.  Say, like Shelley's Prometheus, "I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer, being evil."  Consider that, as John Paul II said, hell begins here.  If you've been far enough down the path of mortal sin, as I have, you've felt it.  You know how awful it is.  Imagine what some of these folks who hate us are going through.  Show some compassion, and remember, we're here to help.

We've got to change the culture.  That's the real transformation America needs.  If we can do that, the laws, economics, and politics will take care of themselves.

When The Going Gets Tough . . .

The tough go negative.

THIS JUST IN: PRESIDENT REVEALS NEW HALLOWEEN COSTUME
President Obama (shown below) unveiled the costume he plans to wear for Hallowe'en 2012. While emphatically denying that a trollface was any kind of racist dog-whistle, the president 

said the new look fit well with the spirit of his re-election campaign. Readers will recall that in previous years, President Obama has dressed up as a moderate (2008), as Lyndon Johnson (2009), as a defender of traditional marriage (2010), and as an advocate for religious freedom (2011).

Looks like "Hope and Change" have become "Troll and Blame."

Tell Me You've Never Wanted To Do This

Racists and anti-racists often make a big to-do about the Constitution's counting black slaves as three-fifths of persons for purposes of calculating a state's representation in the House - as though the Constitution were somehow implying their human dignity equaled three-fifths of other people's.  Today, many people seem to think that a Christian should count as only a fraction of a citizen.  Only that part of him not explicitly religious has any place in public affairs, how he conducts himself in office, or how he votes.

Not only is this imbecility; it is an impossibility.  It is also pure evil.

For one thing, name one law that doesn't come from someone's sense of morality.  Rape and murder are against my religion.  Should I refrain, therefore, from publicly condemning such behavior and demanding it be (or remain) outlawed?  It's a sin against prudence unnecessarily to risk a child's well-being by passing a stopped school bus.  Does that make the law unconstitutional?  Since Christ said, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Mt. 22: 21), should we therefore legalize tax evasion?  How then is it invalid to oppose things like infanticide and sodomy?

"But not everybody believes that!"  So what?  Nothing in the Constitution requires anything to be unanimous. Not everybody believes that rape and murder are morally wrong; obviously rapists and murderers don't.  Child-molestation, that charge you keep shouting while you hold your ears to keep from hearing anything the Church tries to tell you?  Google NAMBLA.  Clearly, therefore, we still believe in majority rule, and if the majority happens to be Christian, it must really suck to be you.

The point of the Establishment Clause was to forbid equating full citizenship with membership in a specific church.  The government has no right to compel you to believe.  But it has every right to make you behave.  That's what governments are for.  In America, how far the government is allowed to go in this pursuit is up to us, the people.  All of us, not just some secular, worldly compartment to be kept uncontaminated by faith.  To say otherwise is to tell Christians:  "You may give your soul to Jesus all you like, but your ass belongs to the state."

And that's the kind of thing that makes this guy smile:

Benito or Batman.  Your choice, America.

"And What Rough Beast . . ."

Catholic Memes posted this on their Facebook page today.  It's too funny not to pass along.

"You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.
Sadly, no one can be told what the LeHayetrix is.  You have to see it for yourself."

If you don't recognize him with the shades, that's Dr. Scott Hahn in the role of Morpheus.  If Vatican II was the Church's new Pentecost, Scott Hahn is our new St. Paul - a former anti-Catholic Scripture scholar with a remarkable gift for demonstrating the Biblical basis of Catholic teaching.  The reference here is to his book, The Lamb's Supper.  Read it.  Now.  Thank me later.  You'll never look at the Apocalypse - or the Liturgy - the same way again.

Cradle Catholic though I am, I discovered Revelation the same way Dr. Hahn did:  Hal Lindsay's The Late, Great Planet Earth.  I'm not sure I was even ten yet when I saw that movie, and I bought a lot of it hook, line, and sinker (How do you argue with Orson Welles?)  Many younger folks have been fed the same interpretation through the Left Behind series.

Dr. Hahn's exploration focuses largely on the liturgical aspects of the Bible's last book.  Remember, most of what we see centers on what's going on in Heaven, and the worship of God in Paradise.  We have candles, and altar, incense, a choir singing the Sanctus, etc.  Most importantly, we note that God's actions in Revelation always occur in response to the prayers of the faithful, something to keep in mind in times like these.

Which is what I really wanted to talk about.  There's also a Beast in Revelation, one often identified with the Antichrist, the "man of lawlessness" St. Paul tells us of in 2 Thessalonians.

Paul says he is to come on the heels of a final rebellion against God.  Our Lord, too, warns that "many will fall away, and betray one another, and hate one another.  And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.  And because wickedness is multiplied, most men's love will grow cold." (Matt. 24: 10-12)

Now, let me emphasize that I am NOT saying the End O' the World is necessarily nigh.  It could very well just be the end of Western Civilization as we know it, and from a Divine perspective, that's not very serious. God's call to holiness, the saving merits of Christ's Passion, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit pervade all times and places.

That said, look at the world around us (and aren't we just surrounded by the world today?)  The number of Americans professing no religious affiliation is at an all-time high.  Only 9% of Catholics cite their faith as the major influence on their political worldview.  48% are pro-"choice."  And as to how the Catholic vote's breaking, do I even need to go there?

Well, yeah, actually.  I do.

They're going to fall away.  I know, the dissenters insist they're not going anywhere, but they are.  And of their own accord, most of them, not because they get excommunicated.  Once the real persecutions start, you'll see a lot of them split off.  It'll happen fast.  Probably a schism at first, something like they have in China:   All of the smells, and all of the bells, but no binding doctrine or mention of hell.  It'll be interesting to see whose faith gets lost, and whose turns around and grows strong in the face of trials.  I expect there will be surprises on both scores.

If this is the agenda we're allowing, if not openly advocating for our society, how long before we reach the point where Satan takes the mask off and decides to rule outright?  All it would take is a little honesty on the part of the Media-Intellectual Complex to come out and acknowledge whom they're really serving.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand.

Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

The Second Coming - hardly are these words out,

When a vast image out of spiritus mundi

Troubles my sight.  Somewhere in the desert,

A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,

Gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again, but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?  -Yeats

Mandatory Post on the Upcoming Election

We've seen this before.

An incumbent president who recently enjoyed record-high approval ratings.  A poor economy, and his seeming inability to fix it, have begun to erode this, but he's still considered invincible.

The opposition party isn't doing anything to help themselves.  Badly divided and disorganized, they've run a half dozen or so second-string candidates, the most promising of whom had to drop out over an alleged sex scandal.  The convention ends up nominating perhaps the candidate least appealing to the party's base - a little-known governor with a questionable history and a reputation as a crashing bore.  Worse, his running mate is also known as a wonky propeller-head with positions that some find extreme.

The results should seem foreordained.  But, no.

As the debates get underway, the challenger shows himself well-prepared, highly intelligent (yet never condescending), sincere, down-to-earth, and in an age of ugly elections, a perfect gentleman.  He appeals to his credentials as a moderate with a strong bipartisan record, a workable plan, and a fresh-faced enthusiasm conspicuously absent in his jaded and peevish opponent.  Finally, in terms of policy, he seizes the center, in terms so plain that his ideas sound not only right but obvious, and thus without pointing fingers makes the other party look like rabid extremists.

Sound like a recipe for a win?

It was.  Twenty years ago.

Odd parallel, that.  It struck me, watching the debate, that Governor Romney, instead of being the conservative warrior we all hoped would bring our curses home to Obamunism and the Culture O' Death, may be wiser than we.  In one stroke, he's completely discredited the image of the stuffy, out-of-touch, bloodless plutocrat the left has painted.  It's right out of Bubba's playbook.

And not just Clinton's, either.  Remember the "Dewey Defeats Truman" fiasco?  In 1948, the top 50 political journalists in America were surveyed about Truman's re-election prospects.  Not one thought he could possibly win.  How did Harry do it?  He took a train across the country, stopping at little towns along the way.  Emerging from his car, the president said:  "Hi, folks!  I just thought I'd stop by and let you have a look at me, so you can decide if I'm the monster they all say I am!"

"Give 'em hell, Harry!" the people replied.

As then, so now.  The myth is busted.  We have seen the real candidates, and cannot now unsee them.

Give 'em hell, Mitt!