Editor’s note: The following Sept. 13, 2022, kath.net interview by Lothar C. Rilinger, translated for CWR by Frank Nitsche-Robinson, is reprinted here by kind permission of kath.net and Mr. Rilinger.
Vatican (kath.net) The term “New World Order” is interpreted as a metaphor for a conspiracy theory. But it only describes a concept of society, which – like any other – has to face the intellectual discourse. The fall of communism in 1989/90 marked the end of an historical process which the American sociologist Francis Fukuyama has called the end of history. In his view, communism as the antithesis of democracy had become obsolete, so that a new social foundation needed to be conceived. Thus a new contest had begun: the one about the future of social development beyond Marxism. The class struggle of the Marxist type was supposed to have had its day – which, however, the Marxists are not prepared to accept – but in the struggle for supremacy in the discourse on society and the state, the democratic model was also no longer seen as an ideal. The principle of one man, one vote is associated with the Enlightenment period. Therefore, it is to be transcended so as to be able to attach the attribute of “progress” to social development. This is based on a principle according to which man – detached from God, who is no longer presumed to exist – may do everything he can. Self-limitation stands in the way of progress.
Since God as the final authority of human action is rejected in the belief in progress, in the New World Order a society is to be constructed which knows no limits and in which everything that people are capable of developing and thinking is to be permitted; nothing is to stand in the way of progress or hinder it in its development. Metaphysics is considered pre-modern and banished from social discourse and with it also the belief in redemption of man in eternity. Only that which can be falsified or verified is to be valid, so that man’s redemption is to take place on earth, in earthly life. What Karl Marx called paradise on earth is to be achieved in a different way through the progress that is shaped by the New World Order. Since this world order negates recourse to God and, like Feuerbach, declares Him non-existent, it is not surprising that the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, feels called upon and condemns the New World Order. We spoke with him about this.
Rilinger: For some decades now, the demand that the existing world order be replaced by one that no longer knows recourse to God, but only to unconditional progress, has again been haunting political discourse. The demand for this world order, which is called the “New World Order,” is being raised almost alongside the political, public discourse. What must we understand by the “New World Order”?
Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller: According to both the Jewish and Christian creeds, it is God Himself who, in His sovereign goodness, created the world out of nothing and ordered it in His eternal Word (logos, reason) and Spirit (power, wisdom). Human reason is finite and in principle – due to original sin – susceptible to disturbance by egoistic impulses, such as the disordered desire for power, money, self-indulgence / pleasure. Man is thus intellectually and morally fallible.
Only if we allow ourselves to be addressed by God’s Word and to be enlightened, guided and strengthened by His Holy Spirit, can we recognize the truth and freely-willingly choose the good as the goal of our actions. Historical experience teaches us that every attempt to give order to the world through human understanding and human power has invariably ended in catastrophe. We need not reach back far to see this. The colonialism and imperialism of the 19th century, the totalitarian ruling systems of National Socialism, Japanese super power ideology and Leninist-Stalinist communism, as well as all dictatorships of smaller states in South America, Asia and Africa prove that the grasp for world power, i.e. the establishment of a New World Order has sprung from a diabolic-destructive and not a theo-logical way of thinking.
The program of a New World Order under the condition of a total economization of man, in which self-appointed financial and political elites remain as the thinking and controlling subject, comes at the price of the depersonalization of the masses. The human being is merely the biological raw product, which is upgraded to a computer in a total network of information. There will no longer be any person then, no immortality of the soul, no living being with heart and mind, spirit and free will. What remains is a construct without home and hope.
This involves the reduction of 99 percent of the world’s population to a chipped biomass, to human material or a consumer group, to bots. Human beings have only as much “value” (“value” here is meant economically, not morally) as they contribute to the maintenance of this system of domination and exploitation and function within it. Totalitarian domination is realized in an absolute bureaucracy when man is abolished as man. “Action would prove to be superfluous in the coexistence of human beings when all human beings have become one, all individuals have become specimens of the species, all action has become terms of acceleration in the lawful apparatus of movement of history or nature, and all actions have become executions of the death sentences which history and nature have imposed anyway,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951 (Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, München 2021, 959; ibid. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1973), while the founder and operator of the Davos World Economic Forum recently signaled his transhumanist utopias to the world in these words: “Today’s external devices […] will almost certainly be implantable in our bodies and brains. […] These technologies can invade the hitherto private realm of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.” (Klaus Schwab/Nicholas Davis, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, New York 2018, 39; 28).
Totalitarianism is always hatred of life, preferring the mechanically reducible to the living and sacred. The control group decides who may live or must die. In the war of aggression against Ukraine, Putin lets his troops bring along mobile crematoria so as not to endanger his power domestically by the images of returning coffins.
Biden announces mobile abortion buses in the U.S., including incineration of the children’s cadavers, to undermine the Supreme Court ruling. At issue is the demonstration of morally disenfranchised power and the right to kill children until shortly before birth. This is all the worse for the witness of God’s natural and revealed truth because both Putin and Biden claim to be Christians. But before the judgment of God, “evildoers will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (cf. 1 Cor. 6:10).
In Russia, anyone who calls the brutal invasion of Ukraine war instead of “special military operation” is punished. In the West, anyone who calls infanticide in the womb murder or demonstrates against it in front of the killing clinics is hauled before the courts. In China, organ trafficking is carried out with cruel disregard for the self-determination of those from whom organs are stolen. Taking advantage of the plight of women in poor countries, “Western” agencies in rich countries are conducting the dirty business of surrogacy. These are not nightmares that dissolve upon awakening in reality, but reality that has become a nightmare.
Rilinger: The banishment of God from the life of the citizens of the state is an Enlightenment demand that found its highest expression in the nihilism that Nietzsche never tired of preaching. Has history shown that a state or a society without God can succeed?
Card. Müller: No less a figure than the eminent philosopher and highly alert analyst of modern totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, summed up the “nihilistic credo of the 19th century” with Dostoevsky’s saying: “Everything is permitted,” namely when man does not believe in God as his Creator and his Judge. (Hannah Arendt, What Does Personal Responsibility Mean in a Dictatorship?, Munich 2020, 43; lecture first given in 1964/65). It is true that since the early Enlightenment philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) there have been more than just a few attempts to develop atheistic or evolutionary-materialistic ethics with the aim of detaching individual and social ethics from their transcendental basis. But these boldly propagated initiatives had to fail necessarily because there is morality only if a person has to answer personally, not before the conditional world, but before the Unconditional.
The unconditionally valid good or the evil to be avoided cannot itself be only a part of this world or a function in it.
Only the personal relation of a person’s ego with his divine judge, whom he addresses as “Thou” (Abba, Our Father) and Who meets him face to face, makes it possible that morality is not a relation to objective values, but a personal relation with the author and epitome of the true and the good.
As Christians, we also acknowledge that the demands of the moral imperative did not first become known to us in the revealed Decalogue. For God has already inscribed them in the mind and heart of every human being. As a result, also the “pagan”, i.e. man before the salvation-historical encounter with God, grasps in his conscience the unconditional validity of the commandments as divine law: You shall not steal, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not worship the creature instead of the Creator. (cf. Rom. 2:14-24).
Rilinger: If, in the New World Order, power is derived from the economy and the world is conceived as a single market, the question arises as to how power – as Romano Guardini demanded – is tamed. Can the global power that results from the wealth be restrained and, if this should be possible, by whom?
Card. Müller: Power and wealth are interdependent. But it depends on the people whether they tame the power over the forces of nature, the chaos of impulses and interests, and whether they put the goods rightfully acquired through work, diligence and intelligence into the service of the general public. Jesus pointed out the temptations of potentates to abuse their power over people, and the difficulties for the rich to enter the kingdom of God when they let their hearts cling to wealth and close their eyes to the poor.
Globalism results from the possibilities of modern communications, means of transportation that shrink distances, technology that makes possible an immense increase in the production of consumer goods and thus an increase in the standard of living for billions of people. But at all times, the concentration of political power, finance and the means of communication in the minds and hands of a few – whether as a party, a financial group or a media mogul – has been a calamity for the rest of humanity. Global centers of power and finance that pose as world governments also globalize their dark sides. They function only dialectically with their antithesis. The super-men need their sub-men, the superrich their dependent clientele, which is alimented by them on a low level. The absolute rulers need their willing subjects and they fear free and self-confident citizens like the devil fears holy water. Peter and the Pope as his successor at all times remind the high council of absolute earthly power: “We must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29).
The secularized and officially anti-Christian “West” allows for Christianity as a civil religion at best. However, celebrities who have decidedly renounced the Church are happy to use a church of art-historical value as the backdrop for their wedding, even though they do not wish to understand marriage as a divine institution and as a promise of His grace.
In China, the atheist state party persecutes Christians and uses their gatherings as an opportunity for indoctrination against faith in Christ, the true Savior of the world. Who would still rely on diplomatic tricks and political compromises with the devil, the “ruler of this world” (Jn 12:31; 2 Cor 4:4), to get something good out of it for Christianity?
The essential difference is that Christ laid down his life so that we might live, while the rulers of this world consume the lives of their subjects so that they might live a few moments longer and more luxuriantly, and then ultimately end up in the hell they have prepared for others on earth, “where their worm (of conscience) does not die and the fire (of unkindled love) is not quenched.” (Mark 9:48) With this metaphor, Jesus Christ is telling us that conscience gnaws like a worm in these persons. The warmongers in Ukraine, at whose hands tens of thousands of people die, have no conscience, but this will not help them as an excuse before the judgment of God.
Rilinger: Auguste Comte relied on progress without God. Thereby he declared the last instance, before which humans must answer, as obsolete. Is there consequently a possibility that the boundary established by God, but abolished by man, can be replaced by a boundary devised by man?
Card. Müller: Where could this boundary be? If in a ship the boundary between the interior and the seawater that washes around the hull is abolished through the perforation of the ship’s side, even the best captain and the fully attuned crew can no longer save the ship from sinking and themselves from perishing. All the hopes for a happy humanity through political and technical revolutions have not been fulfilled. The utopians are like Sisyphus, the tragic symbolic figure who always fails just before the success of self-redemption. The dreams of the brave new world are as unsuccessful as the bald man who wants to pull himself out of the swamp by his lost hair instead of grasping the outstretched hand of his savior.
Rilinger: Is the New World Order based on market power democratically legitimized?
Card. Müller: The problem is that the super-billionaires, through their “charitable” foundations and their influence in the international organizations, make the national governments, which – at least in one third of the states – are democratically elected, dependent on them. They are received like great statesmen or celebrities and VIP’s and flattered by local rulers in the vain hope of getting some of their glitz and glamour. An economically successful entrepreneur, even if he has become rich quite legally and morally unobjectionably, is far from being a philosopher, let alone the Messiah. So what! Plato’s philosopher kings, too, were not the saviors of the world. Only the Son of God, who assumed our humanity, could change the world for the good once and for all, because He conquered sin, death and the devil and brought us the knowledge and salvation of God. But everyone, if they have been successful in their profession and business, can contribute to a relative improvement in our worldly existence.
We Christians have a responsibility to contribute to the building of a humane world with our expertise and experience in the various branches of the craft and culture-creating trades, without, of course, acting out or allowing ourselves to be celebrated as its saviors and redeemers.
We must hold on to the notion that in a democracy every adult citizen has a voice with which he freely elects the delegates and the rulers. Free voting is something quite different from polling moods that change daily. The former comes from the citizen’s responsibility for the common good, whereas the mood only reflects a momentary feeling.
Rilinger: For some years now, there has been growing suspicion that not only scientific freedom of discourse, but freedom of speech as a whole, is being curtailed by the immediate accusation of promoting a conspiracy theory if one argues beyond the mainstream. Can it be accepted that freedom of speech is curtailed in such a way?
Card. Müller: Stalin and Hitler continually feared conspiracies, whether out of calculation in order to intimidate and eliminate the opposition, or out of their paranoia, which was the breeding ground of their tyranny. The Jesuits in the 18th century at the Bourbon courts, the Vatican in the 19th century in the liberal-anticlerical circles, and the Jews in the 20th century – according to the forged “Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion” – were all considered carriers of a world conspiracy. The Church and the capitalists, too, were considered the enemies of progress towards the workers’ paradise, who could only be stopped by the communist world revolution. In my youth, people spoke of conspiracy theories in the case of eccentric contemporaries who saw UFO’s everywhere or concocted unverifiable world explanations from contemporary events.
Today the word “conspiracy theorist” is an ideological fighting term of mentally challenged anti-fascists, who lead their “fight against the right” with Nazi methods, i.e. intimidate media, threaten with violence, for example against the judges of the Supreme Court who denied the human right to abortion, or against a lecturer at Humboldt University – once the epitome of the German scientific standard – who wanted to explain the biologically evidenced fact of the bisexuality of human nature, without which there would not be any individual human beings, not even those who rabble against it.
Rilinger: Criticizing the New World Order is sweepingly labeled a conspiracy in order to nip discussion in the bud. Can you explain the reasons for this ban on discussion?
Card. Müller: The ideologist knows only the friend who submits to him with hurrah like a cretin, or the enemy whom it is necessary to destroy – preferably physically, if the system permits it, or somewhat more mannerly by social death like shitstorm, public ostracism, dismissal or by obliteration in a spiral of silence.
When a person, who is persecuted physically and by psycho-terrorist means, in his distress takes his own life, his tormentors still see themselves perversely justified in eliminating pests, as was precisely the jargon in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Godlessness and misanthropy go hand in hand.
Rilinger: Another form of a ban on discussion is the statement that one’s own opinion is considered to have no alternative. Isn’t the determination of the lack of alternatives the demand that one’s own opinion has to be considered absolute?
Card. Müller: In finite things there are always several aspects and perspectives to be considered. Only the distinction between true and false and between good and evil is without alternative, because it arises from the evidence of its principles. Certainly, there are also truths without alternatives in practical things, such as that a house collapses if it does not stand on a firm foundation. But these are general physical, mathematical or philosophical basic principles. Even in a sandy area you can build a house, so long as you are able to build a good foundation otherwise. The opinion that one could not build cities in the sand of the March was thus by no means without alternative. Therefore, one must not use this kind of vocabulary to suppress legitimate discussion and controversy and conveniently spare oneself the better arguments.
Rilinger: Is the philosophical/political discourse about the New World Order a necessary discourse to show where the unrestrained economic power of some individuals can lead societies and states?
Card. Müller: The morally unrestrained rule of ideologists, politicians and economists over the people in the one world must necessarily lead to lack of freedom, oppression and extermination of disagreeable opponents or people useless for the system.
The culture of death blows over the whole world with the ideological delusion of the right to abortion, the right to self-mutilation (in the irreversible sex change), euthanasia, the alleged mercy death for those who are too tired to live, incurably ill and allegedly senselessly vegetating seniors, killing whom is supposed to be an act of compassion.
Rilinger: The Christian momentum is to be increasingly banished from political discourse. Doesn’t this also destroy the foundation on which the Western world is built?
Card. Müller: Without Christianity – with its root in the history of God’s revelation in Israel, in which the best heritage of Greek and Roman culture is also integrated, in connection with the heritage of the whole of humanity – Europe and America would only be empty territories, where markets alone rule and which are inhabited by nameless inhabitants, who are granted the form of existence of a robot.
Rilinger: You have stated in the discourse that very rich people like Bill Gates or the investor George Soros want to enforce the New World Order. What do these two men in particular intend and what means do they have to enforce their ideas?
Card. Müller: According to their own statements, these two stand for the New World Order, which they want to establish in their image and likeness. No one other than God can judge their personal motives. But their program and actions are accessible to everyone, so that we can judge them according to their positive or negative effects. The intellectual content of their contributions is, measured against the intellectual and cultural history of mankind, rather modest and is easily matched by any normal student in the first few semesters – in whatever subject.
In response to my critical remark, some strong-voiced and weak-minded spokesmen in Germany have emboldened themselves to find anti-Semitic patterns in the relativization of Mr. Soros’ remarks, just because he was born a Jew. Looking at the anti-Christian biased political and racist “anti-Semitism” of the 19th and 20th century, as represented by Heinrich Treitschke, Bernhard Förster, the husband of Nietzsche’s sister, Richard Wagner, Houston Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler, as a Christian one can only say that Jesus was also born a Jew, in whom we Christians, from whatever nation, in living and dying, place all our hope. In Germany, the spiritual landscape is not only ideologically contaminated, but it also groans under the spiritual and moral incompetence of its loudest totalitarian screamers.
Rilinger: Is the construct of the New World Order set as absolute and sacrosanct, so that any criticism is forbidden?
Card. Müller: It is an undeniable sign of totalitarian rule when criticism is criminalized. It can hardly be worked out better than Hannah Arendt did in 1951 in regards to the Third Reich and comparably to Stalinism, as she described it in her book Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, (Munich 2021; The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1973).
Rilinger: Even if a new world order is to be created without God – Francis Fukuyama in his book “The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order” pointed out that a religious renewal will take place. However, not because the individuals are convinced of the truth of revelation, but because in the face of the lack of communality and the dissolution of social ties in the secular world they “feel a need for ancestral rituals and cultural traditions.” Can you share this view on the return of religion and imagine a further and stronger recourse to Christianity?
Card. Müller: Religion does not return like one natural phenomenon that draws another after it. Religion, as the spiritual-moral disposition and attitude to trace the entirety of the world back to the higher power of the divine, and to feel a reverence before the sanctity of life, is not detachable from human nature. Supernatural faith, poured into us by the Holy Spirit, which enables us to fully assent to God in His Word to us with mind and will, is something different. In the parable of the unjust judge who deprives a poor widow of her right, Jesus tells his disciples: “Will not God vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:6ff).
The decline of the Church in Germany and in Europe is not caused by secularization, the Church struggle of the totalitarian regimes and the Kulturkampf from Bismarck to the Giordano Bruno Society, but by the lack of faith, the weakness of hope and the coldness of love of the baptized and confirmed Catholics, who rather let themselves be beguiled by the siren sounds of the world than listen to the voice of their Good Shepherd and follow Him.
Rilinger: Eminence, thank you very much.
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This is again not a purely German or Western Problem, but of Western Systems of thought and expression that have been allowed to influence the Church outlook, prayers and the direction and tenor of the liturgy. Christianity – and the Church originated in an ascetic Eastern settings, not the East per se.
WE ARE PAGANS WHO THINK THEY ARE CHRISTIANS
One wonders how much progress we have made since Pope Benedict XVI as Bishop Ratzinger pointed the problem in the early 1960 lecture that we are pagans who think they are Christians, not Christians who where pagans.
Had these been heeded than to be sensationalized and ignored we would have stopped in the 1970s- all of us that “we are heading for a precipice” or our ship is only balanced by the weight of clamour, the prayers of the saints calling us back to prayer.
If we are serious in my view in correcting the institutional decline- its westernizing phenomenology, we would do well to focus on the following.
1. Utilitarian thinking and approaches to religion which leads men to bargain with God or see the Church carnally as a stepping stone and/ or close in in self love.
2. Atomistic thinking combined with individualism that have severed men from each other- to interact only in boxes, then severed man from creation and as it is happening severed man from himself in His True Identity with God
2. The nature of language or languages as not consisting in words, but the ability to relate and to love.
3. Love as both a gift and and ever hovering spirit of the creator looking for someone to feed- infuse her spirit.
To the extent that these are denied, the crisis to paraphrase Pope Benedict XVI as Joseph Ratzinger “The Crises has only just began. The Church will grow smaller, much smaller and will be rebuilt by Saints”
I have utmost respect for Cardinal Muller for his teaching in conformity with the Magisterium of Christ’s Church. I will always remember the privilege of serving as Deacon at a Mass he said a few years back at Christendom College. That was just a week or two before Francis sacked him.
What about the New World Order pope?
Cdl Muller uses the metaphor of sinking ship with a hole in the hill. It seems the Barque of Peter is floundering badly, has been cast adrift from its moorings and is taking on water up to the poop deck. The rowers sitting in the pews are drowning.
Hull not hill🤬
Mod fix?
Maybe I’m missing your point, but boats have hulls, not hills.
The, wanna be, New World Order, UN, has certainly raised its ugly head. The UN will not send UN troops to protect Africans from the genocide of Muslim terrorists. However, the UN will genocide the African people, by denying humanitarian aid, upon any African nation who does not abide by their new ‘right to abortion’ stand, in their plan to violently murder billions of babies. Talk about the diabolical ‘New World Order’ ungodly plans of man.
Excellent points, Steven, revealing the real prejudice of the UN. Black lives don’t matter when they are grounded in Christian truth concerning marriage and life. They are sacrificed to the closest wolf handy.
The UN was once a world protector. Now the UN has switched to become a Fascist ‘New World Order’ organization which uses the weapons of, denying humanitarian aid, and denying UN troop protection, to discriminate against and annihilate cultures and religions around the world, who do not change to their liberal Fascist political agenda. We as a Church need to have a worldwide day of prayer, that the Fascist UN give up their evil attack on culture and religion.
Much truth hidden in fancy rhetoric.It would be nice to see this discourse distilled down in language more easily understood by the laymen. One comment on the slant of the discourse is that there is an implication that the extreme left is to blame for the present dilemma. We must also look to the right for culpability. It seems that both ends of the political spectrum are equally guilty of using the same means to further their political agendas: fake news, stacking courts,Presidential privilege, conspiracy theories etc. As Christian Catholics we must be in the world but not of the world. We must NOT compromise our principles to win an election by supporting a candidate who is grossly morally compromised. Better to loose an election than out soul. The answer to our problems is not legislation or domination, but education. We must teach people about who Christ is and what He has done for us and why we need Him: sin and repentance. We must free ourselves of politics and live and preach the Gospel. Just a thought and opinion of an 83 year old man who has seen a lot during his brief stay on Earth. God bless you all.
Thank you, James.
And what do you suggest, James, when BOTH candidates are morally compromised??
yes, this is a really interesting comment. As a British Catholic, I do find the politicization of US Catholics interesting. Here in the UK, we have Catholics in all the main political parties. For us, it’s about sticking together as Catholics in the most secular country in Europe. I have close friends on both sides of the political spectrum and those who don’t vote for anyone. I’m not criticizing anyone here, just saying I find the difference interesting.
Presumably, Rilinger wrote the introduction to his interview; his introduction presets an elite power oriented worldview. Rilinger presumes existence of a world order, Card Müller initially skirts the issue and responds obliquely [Unlike Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò a theorist, Card Gerhard Müller previously seemed dismissive of world order conspiracy theories]. As such, Müller admits “the establishment of a New World Order has sprung from a diabolic-destructive and not a theo-logical way of thinking”. The Cardinal refers to new world order as intellectually amorphous rather than conspiratorial. “Today the word ‘conspiracy theorist’ is an ideological fighting term of mentally challenged anti-fascists” (Müller).
Rilinger nevertheless presses Card Müller on conspiracy theory, the cardinal admitting the George Soros, Bill Gates effort to “enforce a new world order” in their own image. That his criticism of them was met with accusations of anti semitism. Card Müller correctly assesses that the collapse of Christianity opened the world to a totalitarian new world order.
Conspiracy theory is not fully addressed by the Cardinal. Whether conspiracy exists beyond the two persons named, Soros and Gates. For example, we know by admission of Soros and others, that here in the US many in our Justice Dept, justicial system are financially supported, acquiring influence, judicial positions in alliance with Soros Gates ideology. Our president has had dialogic intercourse with Gates, as has our Holy Father [allegedly Soros once asserted, I’m like God! I tell the pope what to do.]. European Union members, advocates of ecological primacy concern, LGBT rights enforcement in Europe and the US indicate they’re in league with the Soros Gates global diarchy. There appears at least the suggestion of such a global conspiracy [understood as like minded, interfacing influential persons].
But Father, isn’t the most significant element of conspiracies the power given to its ideological “influential” architects by the populations that provide uncritical willing validation? Doesn’t all evil in the world originate with the individual sinner, and when the lives of masses of individual sinners are unrepentant, isn’t there a need to expiate repressed guilt in such a manner to seek or create accommodating belief systems that make it easier to explain evil in the world in terms of other people, or other cultures with the “wrong’ preconceptions, resistant to “new ways of thinking,” instead of right thinking progressives?
Your partner in powerful commentary in these columns, wrote a fine book lamenting the despair of today’s young in a morally corrupt civilization. The CWR interview of Peter D. Beaulieu captures much of his thesis, with which it’s hard to fault. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/03/29/a-generation-abandoned-why-whatever-is-not-enough/
Conspiracies exist with a largely unconscious momentum, a massive series of small steps of social engineering and verbal engineering, often so subtle its originators fail to grasp their impact, in spite of temptations to display their vanity. Humanity hungers for exoneration while committing crimes. The young, frustrated in finding a coherent belief system, are simply baffled, depressed, or suicidal. The Church suffers from amnesia and is too busy, particularly under this current pontificate, seeking to sustain this amnesia.
Collective conspiracy. An idea to further explore. There are collective social dynamics identified by sociologists, disputed by some. Although, there is viable evidence of phenomena such as mass frenzy, fear, guilt, obsession with an idea or ideology. The latter assumes conviction of absolute right, all else wrong, to be removed. Faith in Christ is the sole mass belief that is tempered by justice and reason as revealed by him.
Yes, I agree, I have the book. Peter Beaulieu’s A Generation Abandoned is an excellent study.
Scripturally, the prophetic Matthew certainly is timely when he speaks of “the ‘Gates’ of hell…” (Mt 16:18). And, then, where we read that “only that which can be falsified or verified is to be valid,” we correctly fear the displacement of “good and evil” with the verbiage of the supposedly creative and creational new word disorder…
Dogmatically, even, is a compromising safe-space signaled in the bland language of what is, say, “inadmissible”—and perhaps “admissible” as in pastoral infantilism toward sexual novelties, from Marx, Batzing, Hollerich & Co. first in Germany and now Belgium, and soon the 2023 Synod on Synodality?
Good and evil? Too bad, the slippery-slope silence toward the dubia and the non-“progressive” Veritatis Splendor:
“A separation, or even an opposition, is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid and general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision [no longer a ‘moral judgment’!] about what is good and what is evil [!]. On this basis, an attempt is made to legitimize so-called ‘pastoral’ solutions contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a ‘creative’ hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept [thou shalt not!]” (Veritatis Splendor, n. 56).
Earlier, I referred to a moment in Church history that evokes your mention of the Gates of Hell, when I commented on the Extra Extra article ‘Substituting Radical Social Politics for Doctrine’. “Key within this is what may be brushed off as naive foolery. Nonetheless a series of interconnected events followed the Vatican Gardens Pachamama [goddess of the Andes that accentuates reverence for the natural world, and with that pre Christian social mores] enshrinement ceremony – the German Synodalweg, The grand Synod on Synodality”. You mention these events here. Idolatry has consequences.
Gates of Hell has varied interpretations, the most common, that the Daemonic will not prevail over the Church. Although, we know that it is not the Church that will prevail, rather it’s Christ. Christus vincit. Anthony Esolen offered a different interpretation, that the Daemonic will not ‘contain’ the Church, that there’ll always be witness to Christ.
Desperate prayers for fortitude with our Lady of Sorrows and daily prayers to the Holy Spirit for patience is all I have right now. I try to live a Christian life but with 3 kids in college, a mortgage, rising utility and gas payments, no raise in 3 years and inflation making it harder to live I wonder if a Catholic Prince really understands what suffering in the West means right now for middle-class American families like ours trying to raise their kids to be good Catholics and Christians? The addition of mobile abortion clinics, pre-teen at-will sex changes by our Catholic President, Priests blessing LGBTQ couples and a Pope willing to ignore the plight of Chinese Catholics like Jimmy Lai makes me think that either God has something big in store for this world in these days of Noah and Lot or maybe we need to suffer in silence and be thankful for what we have. Oh well, at least we haven’t been rounded up for re-education camps, yet.
We live in an age where there is spiritual and moral decay. There is an aversion to discuss and debate the truth. Feelings and emotions seem to be more important and the new age ideology reinforces and advocates this. The Catholic church and Catholics need to be the beacon of light and hope for our troubled world. We need to be faithful and steadfast to our teachings, the Gospel values, Magisterium and Apostolic teachings of the Catholic Church. We also need to continue to pray, discern and be united to bring about a change in society. This is our calling. This is our mission.
The Pope “has full, SUPREME, and universal power over the WHOLE Church, a power which he can always exercise UNHINDERED.” Cathechism # 882.
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The College of Cardinals, all younger than 80, elects Popes and requires at least 66% votes. Francis will have it on 1/14/23 when Cardinal Bagnasco is 80. He need not appoint more before then, given his 16 new ones, who shall replace 80 year olds through Cardinal Sandri on 11/18/43. Expect Francis to appoint 15 new Cardinals after that date, only 14 months away, who would replace 15 Cardinals through Cardinal Cardozo, who turns 80 on 10/10/44. On that day in 2 years, Francis College Cardinals will be 77%. If Francis retires when he turns 90 on 12/17/26, then he will appoint 83% of the College.
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Benedict is 95. Francis shall be 95 on 12/17/31 if he is Pope. It is possible. Current College members, who are not “Francis Cardinals,” shall be only 6 then. 7 Cardinals were born before 1960; new Cardinal Marengo is 47. They shall elect 2 successor “Francis Popes”, and more shall follow: the same with Francis Cardinals and Francis Bishops, who shall appoint Francis Heads of Seminaries, who shall appoint Francis faculty, who shall teach seminarians to become Francis priests.
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Francis also changed US Bishops appointing 131/273 who are younger than 75, which is when he can retire them. That is 5 fewer than 50%. The 5 turn 75 by 11/19/22. Others turn 75 in the next 5 years from large dioceses (Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Orange County), and 2 are the President and V.P. of USCCB. Soon, Francis Bishops shall control USCCB (retired Bishops cannot vote) and its agenda.
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To those who have resentment toward Francis, remember the saying: “you don’t have the numbers.” They shall have fewer numbers and more resentment with each new day, there is nothing they can do about it, given Catechism # 882.
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Remember Benedict is the cause of Cardinal Bergoglio being Pope Francis because Benedict would be Pope had he not retired, making Francis his Papal legacy. Remember it was the Cardinals appointed by Benedict and John Paul 2 who elected Bergoglio Pope Francis. THEIR Cardinals created Francis. Look to them and to Benedict.
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Benedict also is the cause of Francis not being able to retire before Benedict dies because having 3 living Popes is an ontological impossibility for the Church. Benedict alive creates another Francis Bishop to appoint another Francis Seminary Head to appoint another Francis Seminary faculty to create another Francis priest.
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To those who have resentment of Francis, they can thank Benedict for their resentment. I thank him for retiring as God chose him to do. May Benedict live a long life. The Papal irony of more resentment of Francis caused by Ratzinger is a Papal gift that shall keep on giving.
Prayers and blessings for this godly man.
God’s word is a telescope into the heavenly realm for faith, a microscope to gain spiritual discernment, an angioscope into deep matters of the heart.
A person may be intelligent, accomplished and respected, yet without Christ and the comfort He provides, one’s life is ephemeral and doomed. God advises us to Choose Life, eternal life!
Romans 10:17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
John 16:13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
Hebrews 5:14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
Proverbs 4:23 Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.
Matthew 22:37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?
Blessings and rejoicing in the God of Jacob, all through the shed blood of Jesus Christ!
The “New World Order”: Conspiracy theory or political vision after all?
Can we finally move on from defending ourselves against accusations of being “conspiracy thoerists”? Can we frame the discussion realistically, instead of burning incense to the Mass Media?
I’ll always praise the new tone of Francis’ papacy. Those that expected change in doctrine from the Pope on sexual ethics like abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage would be disappointed. Avete il novo e ’l vecchio Testamento,
e ’l pastor de la Chiesa che vi guida;
questo vi basti a vostro salvamento.(Par. 5.76-78)
You have both Testaments, the Old and New,
you have the shepherd of the Church to guide you;
you need no more than this for your salvation.
We Christians are held by him to an even higher standard because we have greater guidance. This guidance and this support system are a source of enormous pride to Dante and us. We Christians have the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Church to guide us here on earth, alleluia!
Paolo, while it’s certainly true, that Pope Francis hasn’t formally changed doctrine, including the death penalty [inadmissible suggests admissible], Francis by suggestion and error [interpretation of adultery in Amoris Laetitia supported by his mistaken interpretation of Aquinas ST 1a2ae 94, 4, mitigation, conscience] many are misled to believe it’s licit to receive the Eucharist while living in manifest adultery, irregular [homosexual et al] union. Furthermore, his appointment such as pro adult homosexual relations Synodal relator Cardinal Hollerich, his unwillingness to effectively address the German aberant Synodalweg, also suggest, appear to promote those illicit moral behaviors. There is no pronounced admonition from this Vatican on repentance, which is clearly needed.
So, while there are positive features to a more relaxed, accepting posture, what’s lacking is a clearly Apostolic stance.
Before the arrival of «Covid 19» the Klaus Schwab project the World Economic Forum predicted the possibility of a global virus whose consequence would be a reordering of the social, economic and political order aka a «Great Reset».
«Covid 19» turned out to anything but the deadly plague it was hyped to be. Nevertheless, governments styling themselves democratic introduced measures regarding social activity in their countries which would not have been acceptable even in time of war. Its driver was fear of an unknown.
A successful trial run for the «New Global Order»?
The new unelected head of state of the «United Kingdom» is on side.
https://thecountersignal.com/can-king-charles-put-his-wef-past-behind-him/
Re the Cardinal’s remarks about Ukrain he might benefit from delving into the history of the territory. This is not a case of Putin bad, Zelensky good, by any stretch of the imagination.
while I disagree with your views about Covid, I totally agree about the Ukraine/Russia conflict. The way Putin et al are behaving is utterly abhorrent. BUT as you say, President Zelensky’s Ukraine was going down the Western liberal route very rapidly. I do wonder whether this is some of the reason why certainly here in the UK, we only ever get one side of the story?
Well said, why is no one else saying likewise? I’m stunned at the view of Cardinal Muller on Soros & Gates.