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Jesus
Christ
Historical Presence,
Transcendent King
Feast of Christ the King
November 24, 2013
First Published: May
17, 2010
By
Philip D. Ropp
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His
name is Jesus, and He is the Christ,
the Son of the living God. He comes
to us from beyond the sands of time
and from farther than the vast
reaches of space. He is at once
foreign to all that we see and
comprehend, yet so familiar that we
recognize Him with an intimacy that
touches the very innermost part
of our being. He has been with us
always, and, as He has done since
days long before our human measure,
He comes to those who belong to
Him and He beckons, now as then,
"Follow me!" And to those who
recognize Him; who know Him to be
the mysterious and eternal
"One" Who has, in some inexplicable
way, been known to us since before
our human life took shape within the
womb, there is but
one answer that can pass the lips
and that is, "Yes, Lord!"
But this
one answer; this "Yes,Lord!" that
reaches from the bottom of a broken
and aching human
heart, and yearns and seeks to touch
the eternal and majestic glory of
His Sacred Heart, is not the end of
the story of our salvation,
but only marks the beginning of the
long journey to secure it. And
though this story of the quest for
salvation has its beginning and
ending in eternity, it is played
out, in all of its crucial
drama,very much upon the stage of
human history. And this human
history
takes place, for better and for
worse, very much within these
familiar confines of time and space.
As in a medieval passion play,
the entire village of our earth is
drawn into an eternal conflict that
originates – as we do – in a realm
beyond our own. And
because our ancient adversary from
this realm, he who goes by Lucifer
and Satan, and a myriad of other
names that simply mean "the
devil," has been cast into this
world with us, and pursues us to the
grave, this one answer, this "Yes,
Lord!" is the only
hope we have.
While this
drama that plays itself out
upon the earth may be likened to a
staged production, we must not
believe for a moment that it is just
a game; for the stakes are high
and the consequences grim and
irrevocable. When this declaration
is made in the affirmative to follow
Jesus, one should know, from the
outset, that He expects exactly this
to be done. And while He makes no
promise that the journey with Him
will be easy – to the
contrary, the promise is that the
road will be difficult – He does
promise that the destination will be
worth every effort necessary to
get there. And He promises that we
will be under no expectations to
make the journey alone. This promise
is made to us in writing in the
form of a remarkable collection of
works from antiquity that we call The
Holy Bible.
From far
ancient times; from times long
before this mysterious Jesus stepped
into our world and the cross
upon which He died for us became the
centerpiece of our history,there was
left for us a chronicle of this
conflict fought for our
salvation, and how this would be
accomplished within the bounds of
human history. It is a broad and
sweeping story, reaching back into
the dimmest and earliest
recollections that we have as people
on earth. It is that old, familiar
story of how we, through the act of
our earliest ancestors, fell from
grace with God, and lost His most
vital and precious gift to us – life
itself – by succumbing
with a remarkable ease to the
wickedness and snares of the devil.
To this day, all of the cemeteries
of the world, and the reality of the
grave that awaits each and every one
of us, stand in testimony to the
truth of this ancient act of
submission to the evil one that we
call
the “original sin.” Though through
this act we have brought the curse
of death upon ourselves, all is not
lost; for the Lord,
unchallenged in His love for us, and
undaunted from this moment forward,
guides the course of human history
in anticipation of His
entry into our midst in the form of
His Own Son, and our Savior, Jesus
Christ. It is a story that begins at
the dawn of our time, in
that misty realm between primeval
dreams and the awakening of our
historical consciousness, and it
ends in the stark reality of a
broken people and subjugated nation,
decimated by this and other sin,
waiting in desperate anticipation
for the heaven-promised king who
would restore their faded glory. We
call this remarkable chronicle of
the revelation of God's earliest
promise to save us the "Old
Testament."
From
ancient, yet much more recent times;
from the very time in which this
mysterious Jesus did
step into our world and the cross
upon which He died for us did become
the centerpiece of human history,
there was left for us a
chronicle of the story of how this
gracious act of sacrifice for our
salvation was accomplished. This
story is both beautiful beyond
measure and incredible beyond
belief, for in it the gift of life
is restored to us in a way that
exceeds our comprehension and
expectations. And because we accept
the reality of this story in which
Jesus suffers under Pontius Pilate,
is crucified, dies and is
buried, and rises on the third day
from the dead, our living Lord
Himself becomes witness to our
salvation through His act of going
to
the cross on our behalf. Because
Jesus did this, and because He has
the power to do so vested in Him by
God the Father Almighty, in whose
life He participates as His only
begotten Son, so do we now have the
ability to remit our sins unto Him,
gain back the life that was lost
to us in Eden, and live and reign
with Him in heaven forever. And
because this story is so remarkable
and the events so vital to us
all, Jesus ascended into heaven but
left behind His greatest gift to us
in the form of His Church, which
stands forever called to His
service as a witness to the world of
these astounding events. And in the
form of a community of believers,
nurtured by the ongoing
spiritual presence of His mother and
ours, the Blessed Virgin Mary,and by
His Own Real Presence with us in the
form and substance of the
Holy Eucharist, His Church seeks to
convert the world to Him, as we wait
in faithful anticipation of His
Second Coming, and the final
reconciliation of the world. And the
chronicle of the historical
fulfillment of God's earliest
promise to save us, revealed in
the person and work of His Son, and
our Savior, Jesus Christ, has been
recorded and preserved by His Holy
Body on earth, His
Holy Catholic Church, and is called
the "New Testament."
In this New
Testament; in Matthew 18:20,to be
exact, we read these words of Jesus,
"For where two or
three are gathered together in my
name, there am I in the midst of
them." By this measure, we may
surmise that the actual origin
of His Church can be reckoned from
that moment in Genesis 2:22 when the
Lord, in His effort to bring forth a
proper companion for Adam,
brought Eve to life from the rib
removed from his side, and communed
in Eden with His creation and
creatures, until the horror of the
original sin would force Him to cast
them from His presence. Even so, we
know from the Old Testament account
that the Lord maintained
His presence within the Temple of
the children of Israel through the Shekinah,
and even the feminine nature of the
Hebrew word itself hints at the
future Church as the bride of
Christ. And in the
sacrificial worship of Israel, with
the lamb without blemish offered up
for the forgiveness of the sins of
the people, we see such
parallels to the crucifixion so as
to know without question that this
is the origin of the Mass.
Therefore, if the Temple is not the
origin of the Church and the worship
of the Church is not the fulfillment
and cleansing of the Temple, then
this raises many more
historical and theological questions
than are answered. Yet should we see
the origin of the Church in the
release of blood and water
from the pierced side of Christ on
the cross, as did the early Church
Fathers, then we must, at the very
least, see in the Genesis story
such an obvious foreshadowing of the
Church, wherein the bride of Christ
comes forth from His wounded side as
did the bride of Adam, so
as to know that, in one form or
another, that which we today call
the Catholic Church has, in fact,
been with us from the very
beginning.
And, therefore, in the form of His
Real Presence, as expressed in
person in the garden, in the Shekinah
in the Temple, and in the Eucharist
in the Church, so has He.
It is God's
clear intention that our salvation,
while a highly personal and
individual matter is, none the
less, something that we are to work
out in community rather than as
individuals. Even the eremtic
tradition, when played out to the
extreme in the form of the medieval
anchorites (who were bricked into
their individual cells), had, as its
core purpose, the teaching of
the central importance of community
by deprivation of it. To be sure,
the Old Testament "Desert Theology"
upon which even
the strictest forms of the
consecrated life are based, has as
its goal the changing of the heart –
not the isolation of the spirit. And
this change of heart makes no sense
unless it is within the context of
reintegration with, and life within,
the greater
community: the Church. It should
come as no surprise to anyone
that,from the creation of Eve as a
companion to Adam, through the ages
of
the Patriarchs, Israel, and the
Church, to the descent of the City
of God, the New Jerusalem, in the
book of Revelation, the theme of the
holy community is held first and
foremost as a requirement to God's
plan of salvation. And this Holy Community
is so defined by the act of Holy Communion;
the Sacrament of the Eucharist which
consecrates it as such.
The
Eucharist, as instituted by Christ
and preserved in the Church, is the
center of both our person and our
community. For in the earthly form
of bread and wine is the spiritual
substance of Jesus Christ: His Body
broken and His Blood
shed, yet in this act of temporal
death lies the miraculous
transformation to a glorified and
eternal life – for Christ first,
and then through Him, all of us. The
Mass, where the act of Holy
Communion takes place, is where the
connection between heaven and
earth is made, and it is where our
true Holy Community with Him is
forged. It is in the Mass that we
come to the cross, and it is at
the cross where His Body, broken for
us, takes our sins, once and for
all, and His Blood, shed for us,
cleanses forever. Because Jesus is
man and dies in the flesh, he opens
and enters the realm of death. He is
that One Man that Caiaphas points to
in John 11 who, “should
die instead of the people... and not
only for the nation, but also to
gather into one the dispersed
children of God.” To gather unto
Himself not merely those children of
God dispersed within the world,but
also those dispatched in all ages to
the nether realm of death
and the grave. And because Christ is
God Incarnate, He also becomesthe
one and only
living
sacrifice who opens the portal to
heaven, and gathers all of those who
belong to Him to the throne of
God, where He sits at the right hand
of the Father, and welcomes us in
person.
The cross,
then, is much more than a mere
religious symbol dating as far back
into time as the mind can
reach. The Holy Cross of Jesus
Christ is the true axis
mundi around
which the history of the
world revolves. Figuratively, it
casts its shadow backwards to the
dawn of Eden and casts it forward to
the gates of New Jerusalem. Yet
it is no symbol at all, but the
greatest reality of life upon the
earth, with its place set firmly
within the rocky soil of Golgotha,
and its time set securely in the
reign of Pontius Pilate, procurator
of the eastern province of Judea,
during the reign of Tiberius
Caesar, in the time we call
(ironically enough), the Roman
Peace. And so, anchored in time and
space, and witnessed to from
generation
to generation through the living
memory of the Church, the cross
stands as a silent sentinel to the
historical reality of God's great
act of salvation as a real world,
actual physical event, and not a
mere theological idea. It is that
monolith that stands in haunting
testimony to the ancient advent into
our world of a higher and eternal
power, but it is a monument not of
cold, dead, stone, but of
burning, living, wood, drenched in
the very blood of God Himself.
The great
conflict of this modern (or actually
post modern)
world in which we live is rooted in
the stubborn claim of Church
Tradition to the historical veracity
of the astounding supernatural
events which took place in and
around Jerusalem some two millennia
ago. From the days of the original
apostles to our current day, the
witness of the Church has always
been that the events concerning
Jesus, which transpired in Judea in
the days when Pilate was
governor, happened as reported and
recorded in the gospel accounts. To
this very day, at every Mass, we
recite these words from the
Nicene Creed stating that, “For our
sake he was crucified under Pontius
Pilate; he suffered, died, and was
buried. On the
third day he rose again in
fulfillment of the Scriptures.”
Originating in the fourth century,
this credal statement of the faith
is based on the earlier Apostles
Creed, which Church Tradition has
claimed, in one form or another,
dates to the original day of
Pentecost, inspired by the flaming
tongue of the Holy Spirit. In our
day, a time in which the Christian
faith is seen by most as merely
another religious tradition which
must relegate itself to an equal –or
lesser – standing with the many
others, this claim of providing
a path to eternal salvation which is
at once unique and historically
authoritative, brings the Church
into unavoidable conflict: For if
the world is not converted to the
faith, then the only alternative is
for the faith to be converted to the
world: There is no compromise;
there is no middle ground. For the
faith, so converted by compromise to
the ways of the world, is the faith
destroyed. And this leads to
a much more daunting conflict: A
direct confrontation with the
ascended Jesus Christ, Who is, as
our own history tells us, very much
alive and invested with an awesome
and ultimate cosmic power.
The Church
proclaims that the True Faith of
Jesus Christ, as witnessed by and
taught to His apostles, has
always been, and is, represented by
the Catholic Church, which has
maintained from the outset that
eternal salvation, while a spiritual
phenomenon that transcends time and
space, none the less must, and does,
exist historically within the
Biblical context (Sacred
Scripture) and within the
understanding of historical reality,
as preserved by the Church (Sacred
Tradition). By the power of the
ancient Magisterium,
vested
in Peter and the apostles, and
continued through their successors,
the popes and the bishops, the
Church has the authority, the
responsibility, and the obligation
to represent and teach this True
Faith of Jesus Christ to the entire
world, and to do so boldly and
completely, without compromise or
reservation, regardless of the
consequences inflicted by those who
do
not wish to hear it so proclaimed,
and who, therefore, actively oppose
this taking place. And, further,
this must be done regardless
if those who are in active
opposition are those within the
world who teach against the gospel,
or are those from within the Holy
Community
itself who, as Paul warns in Second
Corinthians, teach “another Jesus”
and a “different gospel.”
The
conflict that confronts the Church
today in the proclamation of the
True Gospel of Jesus Christ is not
something that is new to our day and
age, but dates back to the very time
of the apostles. To be sure, the
underlying theme of the New
Testament books, from Acts through
Revelation, is found in the
challenge of proclaiming this true
faith in the face of the heretical
claims and teachings concerning
Jesus that began to circulate with
the astounding news of the empty
tomb – and which continue, in one
form or another, to the present. In
light of this, the reason for the
calling of the Twelve and the depth
and the intensity of the
teaching they received at the feet
of the Master, as witnessed in the
gospels, is both obvious and
apparent. Should we have the ability
today to assemble a council of the
apostles, early fathers, and doctors
of the Church, we would likely be
amazed at their ready
recognition of so many of the
heresies that confront the present
day Church. Indeed, it may be to
their own amazement, and even a
certain
amusement, that the ancient nonsense
of the Gnostic sects still
circulates within our popular
culture in the form of works such as
Holy
Blood,
Holy Grail, and The
Da
Vinci Code.
More
amazing to them, and certainly much
less amusing, would be the way in
which the Church of our post modern
age has adopted the scientific
method of history in such a way so
as to undermine the
Biblio-historical foundations of the
faith. Modern historical method,
which grew out of the anti-Church
sentiment that spurred the
Reformation, and which blossomed
into full flower in the Age of
Reason, has taught the world to look
at the past as a place devoid of
any supernatural influence. In this
world, God no longer walks in the
early morning dews of Eden, and Adam
and Eve have evaporated into
the mists at the dawning of the Age
of Enlightenment. Noah's Ark no
longer churns through the seas of
God's wrath, and the priests of
Israel lift the lamb of atonement
into an empty Palestinian sky. Out
of this same barren soil grew the
“quest for the historical Jesus,”
which presumes that the earthy and
earthly essence of our Savior has
been lost amidst the spurious and
erroneous claims to His divinity
made by these same apostles, early
fathers, and doctors of the Church.
It is this
Jesus who we should now seek; a
mortal man no different than we
are,who lies dead and un-risen
from the grave. It is this Jesus who
has been lost, and we who should
strive to atone for our
forebears' misplaced religious zeal
by seeking to restore his human
reputation and worldly agenda. In a
Church in which so many accept
this worldview as their reality, and
seek so diligently to teach the
faithful the same, these early
martyrs for Christ might find cause
to
seat themselves at the gates of Rome
and cover their heads with
dust.Perhaps, in the bitter irony of
this, they might note the spirit of
the Ouroboros, the pagan serpent who
consumes its own tail in an unending
and
self-destructive cycle of sin. And
in response to this most extreme
teaching of “another Jesus” and a
“different gospel,” they
might have cause to make the cry of
Revelation 18:16 their own:"Alas,
alas, great city..."
It should
be
clear by now that the method and
process of attaining our eternal
salvation is a glorious and
priceless gift that is given to each
of
us individually, but is accomplished
in the real world, within time and
space, and within a special
community that is of God's own holy
design: the nurturing and lovingly
maternal arms of the Church of Jesus
Christ. This is why we refer to the
Church as “Mother
Church,”why we call Her by the
feminine pronoun, and why we
associate Her so closely with our
Holy Mother, the Blessed Virgin
Mary. In Her we see a reflection on
earth of the Eternal Church in
heaven, and at Mass we are connected
in a very real and special way
with this heavenly Church through
the miracle of the Real Presence of
Jesus in the Eucharist. The beauty
and majesty of this is
unfathomable and unspeakable, and no
human mind can fully understand it,
or find the words to adequately
describe such a glorious and holy
mystery. God does not expect anyone
to fully comprehend or be able to
express the richness of His grace as
extended in the act of
Communion with Christ, but love His
Church with all of your heart,mind
and soul, and love your fellow
parishioners as yourself, and He
does promise that you will live in
Her loving embrace with Him, in
heaven, forever.
It should
also be clear by now that because of
the holiness and beauty
that is the Church, She comes under
the most profound and unspeakable
attacks of Satan and his minions,
and is hated by hell more than any
other person or entity upon the
earth. In the Mass we assemble with
Jesus at the Holy Table, where the
devil has no place, and we proceed
with Him to the cross, where Satan
suffered his final and most
ignominious defeat. At every Mass,
we celebrate the death of Christ
because through His death we have
found life, and because we have
found life in Him, Satan's rule upon
the earth is broken, and the
everlasting reign of Jesus Christ
established. So we celebrate the
death of Christ at the cross, until
He comes again in glory, and
mounts the throne entrusted to Peter
that is rightfully His. And when He
thus comes in His glory, the devil
and his angels are subdued
and subjected to the lake of fire,
and the victory of the cross is
consummated and complete. Every
Mass, therefore, is not only a
celebration of the victory of Jesus
at the cross, but an acknowledgment
of Satan's defeat, and that he now
has no power over
us, save what we allow him. Because
of this, Satan's hatred of the
Church is beyond human measure, and
he pours his wrath out upon Her
in no uncertain terms, as we
ultimately await his final and
eternal subjugation at the coming of
the long awaited Day of the Lord.
Perhaps the
greatest weapon that Satan has in
his war against the Church is this
so called “objective” study of
history – objective meaning that
in this historical worldview, the
presence of the supernatural is
denied or, at the least, subverted
into a modernized understanding of
the divine that seeks to separate
God from any intimacy with world
events – and from ourselves, in any
personal and meaningful way. By
extension, this leads to a new and
evermore existential and desolate
theological understanding in which
we find ourselves alone
in a cold, empty, and indifferent
universe. And this results in a
terribly dangerous misconception
that also precludes the active
presence of a highly intelligent,
malevolent and evil spiritual
personality. Never is Satan more
powerful than when he is at his
most subtle. And he is at his most
subtle when he is able to whisper
into the ears of the most
ambitiously learned among us, “I am
not
here.” And while the examples of
this which we may draw from are
myriad, let us, for the sake of
brevity, take a quick and cursory
look at but two of the more
influential:
In the
late 18thcentury, the Biblical
theology movement in Germany gave
coin to the
term “heilsgeschichte,”
which
means, quite literally, “salvation
history.” This movement was an
attempt at organizing the
understanding of God's redemptive
work, as presented in the Bible,
into an historical, systematic
theology. By the late 19th
century, the term was being employed
by German orientalist and Old
Testament historian Julius
Wellhausen in quite a different way.
To
Wellhausen and his students, heilsgeschichte
becamea pejorative term, used in an
attempt to discredit ancient
Israel's
early historical self understanding
as merely an anachronistic theology,
projected back into an earlier time
by a much later Jewish
religious body. According to
Wellhausen's theory, the first six
books of the Old Testament (the Hexateuch)
are comprised of four earlier
strands of tradition which were
woven together to form what we
recognize today as Genesis,
Exodus,
Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers
and Joshua.
Jewish tradition holds that the
compilation of what we call the Old
Testament was accomplished by a team
of editors known as the “Great
Assembly,” which worked under the
direction of the prophet Ezra in the
mid 5th
century BC. Because of this, it is
also referred to as the “Ezra
College.” It was at this time that
the rise of “modern”
Judaism occurred historically, and
this dovetailed neatly with
Wellhausen's theory that these
earlier biblical works represented
nothing more than a mythological
Frankenstein, sewn together out of
the long dead literary body parts of
an earlier (and now defunct)
Palestinian culture, and animated so
as to justify the rise of the
post-exilic Jewish nation.
The work of
Wellhausen and others, which served
to bring the veracity of
the history of ancient Israel into
serious doubt, laid the ground work
for such 20th
century theologians as Rudolph
Bultmann, who would further develop
and extend this view of reality into
the study of the New Testament
by insisting that the
“supernaturalism” of the gospels be
tempered and corrected with an
austere existentialism. The result
was what he termed a
“demythologizing”of the gospel
message that was supposed to result
in more ready access to the
teachings of Jesus
for a scientifically minded
generation, alienated by what he
termed the “mythical world
picture” of the first century. He
envisions in his Jesus a type of new
and re-humanized Prometheus, with
the metaphysical doctrines of
the Church fathers stripped away,
and the mythology of the early
Christians removed to reveal a Lord,
devoid of all divinity, hanging
naked and dead upon the cross. It is
in this Jesus that he urges us to
place our faith, and sees in this
act alone
the one true and perpetual miracle
that exists: That it is somehow in
the face of this futility that God
alone can save us.
Over the
past five hundred years, the ancient
witness of the Church has
been drawn irresistibly into an
increasingly skeptical and
antagonistic relationship with the
world which She seeks to save. In
this 21st century, we are told
insistently by the proponents of the
“objective”
approach to history that our
earliest stories of God's activity
among us are nothing more than the
primeval fantasies of primitive
minds,
and those who apply science to the
study of the ways of God inform us
that the witness of our most revered
martyrs and saints must be
reduced to the merely wishful
thinking of a mythic world in which
miracles were imagined to occur, and
a dead man was thought to have
risen from the grave – as if these
things were somehow less astounding
in that time than in this. Because
there are those in
leadership within our own Catholic
ranks who have been formed in such a
way so as to accept, without
question, this modern teaching of
“another Jesus” who is dead and a
“different gospel” that has no power
to save us: because lost souls such
as these have been
entrusted with the defense of the
faith, and because they have, in
turn, allowed this modern view of
reality to overshadow and denounce
the witness of our beloved ancient
heroes, we now wrestle with a
compromised Church that seeks to
please and serve the world rather
than convert it. And so our modern
expression of the faith has too
often become that of the lukewarm
Church of Laodicea, believing that
in our material wealth we lack for
nothing, while in our deprivation of
spirit we have become most wretched.
And this wretchedness is
such that we are confronted with it
in the news on a daily basis.
As we
move on from here, and as the Church
moves evermore into a future wrought
with violence and uncertainty, we
must know that we stand in
the present age with our past secure
and our future certain. We shall see
that the compromises to the faith
that have brought so much
pain and suffering to so many, and
which are the result of a
post-modernist hierarchy that has
blindly followed the devil robed in
academic garb, have not changed, and
cannot change, the truth of the Magisterium:
That
herein, from the time of the
apostles to the present, and until
the Lord rides the clouds in glory,
the truth of the real Jesus, who
is God Incarnate, and the true
gospel, which is that through His
shed Blood we are saved, remains
secure forever. And the lesson of
history
for the Church has been that though
the behavior of the hierarchy may
allow the compass needle of the
Church to swing wildly to the left
or
to the right, the Magisterium
provides that true magnetic north
that always brings the needle of the
Church back to center and pointing
to the cross. In the midst of
all of the confusion of this present
age, and in support of those who are
faithfully committed to lead the
Church according to the Magisterium,
and who seek diligently to right Her
course, it is high time that were
consider the origins of the faith as
true history, and not as a
mere series of mythological or
theological constructs. And, when
done correctly, we shall see that
this can be accomplished without
falling into the superstitious traps
of fundamentalism, in which all
sensibility is sacrificed to a
contrived worldview not even
contemplated by the ancients
themselves. We must know that, from
the beginning forward, the validity
of the faith must – and does –
rest on firm and secure historical
underpinnings.
When it
became accepted as scientific fact
in the days of Wellhausen that
no such thing as an historical
original sin existed, it led modern
theologians such as Bultmann down a
road to Calvary that ended with
the cold, dead eyes of Christ
staring blankly up into an empty
universe. This has led us into an
age in which sin has become
relative to any wanton desire that
the flesh can justify, and into a
time in which the world has never
been more desperate for the true,
historical knowledge of the real
Jesus Christ, and the
true,historical gospel message of
salvation at the cross: A message
that
leads not to an empty universe, but
to an empty tomb.
Further,
through the acceptance of a post
modern theology that has grown out
of the horrendous error of the past
two centuries, we find ourselves
confronted with a world in which an
evolving neo-paganism tells us we
are not the fallen children of God
seeking our way back to eternity at
the cross, but ascended masters of
science and the gods of a
coming new age of cosmic
enlightenment. The truth of this is,
of course, that of a modern culture
of narcissism that has slipped its
historical Christian moorings, and
is oblivious to the currents rapidly
drawing it into a whirlpool of mass
death and destruction: And
all the while seeking the technology
necessary to spread this plague of
sin across a waiting universe.
Behind all of this, driving
it ever forward through a coalition
of earthly organizations and
individuals who hate the Church of
Jesus Christ, is our old nemesis
from the garden and throughout time,
that old serpent himself, Satan the
devil. And though we have seen the
Church in our time attacked
with a vehemence that has breached
the walls of Rome, we know that the
Magisterium
of Christ still stands true and at
Her heart, and because of this, and
His Real Presence with us, the gates
of hell shall not prevail.
The
battleground on which the war for
our faith and souls is waged is
both historical and familiar. And
while it is a place remote in time
and foreign, it is yet as warmly and
sweetly familiar as a story told
us in the comfort and security of
our Mother's loving arms. Somewhere
in a childlike faith, in that
dreamland between wakefulness
and slumber, lies the story of our
life upon the earth. In this ancient
tale, the armies of hell lay siege
outside the walls of our
beloved Eden. And just as all seems
lost, as hearts break along with the
gates of our long lost primeval
paradise, we hear the trumpet
sound in the distance, and see the
ancient standard of our people –the
cross – appear above the last
horizon. And at the head of
heaven's knights sits the grandest
of them all: the Prince they told us
was long dead, alive and riding
strong. In awe do we behold Him,
His hair flying in the wind, and His
mighty and holy sword, Excalibur,
held high in
triumph and gleaming in the setting
sun. And in that instant we know
that He has come for us, as He
always said He
would. The victory is ours, and as
the joyous cheers of all His people
rise to the heights of glory, He
takes His place upon the
throne and wears the crown of
heaven. And if there should be any
who have not heard or do not know,
the celestial hosts thus
proclaim their King: His name is
Jesus, and He is the Christ, the Son
of the living God.
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