We Are Just Primordial Pancakes – Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid
It bugged me, today, to hear Fox News refer to the National Catholic Register as “right leaning.” Also, Archbishop Viganò does not seem to appear in the secular media without the words “right wing” before his name. Don’t drink the Kool-aid.
“Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” is a reference to the 1978 cult mass-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Jim Jones, the leader of the group, convinced his followers to move to Jonestown. Late in the year he then ordered his flock to commit suicide by drinking grape-flavored Kool-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. In what is now commonly called “the Jonestown Massacre.” One lasting legacy of the Jonestown tragedy is the saying, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” This has come to mean, “Don’t trust any group you find to be a little on the kooky side.” or “Whatever they tell you, don’t believe it too strongly.”
I spoke on this “trust” in my homily today. Whether it’s Kasper or Marx or Cupich or Martin or Reese or America Magazine or the Fish-wrap or the complicit secular mainstream media … the attempt is made to marginalize and dismiss faithful Catholics. This is why I posted several Tweets, today, from those who are considered “mainstream” in the Church today. I warned that we should not drink the Kool-Aid of those who are trying to normalize dissent from Church teachings, while they attempt to marginalize those that do follow the teachings of the Church.
Yes, the words “conservative” and “traditional” have been derided and scorned. When used, it’s context is a kind of warning to take them with a grain of salt. “Conservative” simply means “conserving” or preserving the wonderful legacy handed down to us. “Traditional” simply means a love for the rich treasury of our Catholic faith. In other words, we love it all, not just that which has occurred since 1965, when WE arrived on the scene. “I don’t want to go back!” … is said with scorn and animosity, as though Roman Catholicism was a disaster before the 1960s.
Here’s where the division comes … those disparaging “conservatives” or “traditionalists” have, in fact, drunk the Kool-Aid of such characters as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin, who deny the very existence of sin …
Darwin suggested that human beings are essentially the same as animals or plants or bacteria.
We are all products of random chance, and we are just different sized pancakes mindlessly shaped out of the same primordial batter.
As a consequence, we can have no real responsibility for our actions.
Any sense of guilt that we might feel is pure invention, a mere tactic by some advanced pancakes to dominate some less advanced pancakes.
Freud attributed our sense of guilt to a combination of dangerously repressed psychic drives and artificial, socially constructed behavioral norms.
For Freud too, therefore, all feelings of guilt are a malfunction, something we need to overcome in order to be fully human.
Marx posited that human behavior is essentially determined by economic conditions.
Therefore, our ideas and decisions don’t really belong to us.
They flow automatically from the forces of history.
Any feelings of guilt, of personal regret or remorse, are only illusory; they have no real meaning, because our actions are not really our own.
These theories, and their relativistic spin-offs that have reverberated through the twentieth century and beyond, apparently offer relief from the burden of personal responsibility. Since they eliminate any absolute, fixed moral norms, they imply that our freedom has no proper limits, that we can and should do whatever we want, whatever we feel like. Only when we throw off the shackles of moral obligation, so they say, will we experience the fullness of life.
Does any of this sound familiar, as when we hear such things as, “The Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect”? That’s right, we are all just victims of our circumstances; we are just primordial pancakes who are incapable of avoiding sin. So, if I “feel like” robbing my neighbor, or if a Cardinal “feels like” sexually molesting a teenager, we should just be “tolerant” and “merciful” because “we can’t help it” … because we are just primordial pancakes, after all.
Precisely during the time this NuChurch was being ushered in, a real demonic force entered the world. On “witches night,” April 30, 1966, exactly 50 years from the Angel’s appearance to the children in Fatima in 1916, Anton LaVey founded the “First Satanic Church” in San Francisco, CA. Required reading for members was “The Satanic Bible.” The central theme of the Satanic Bible is, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
It was Mary, at the Wedding of Cana, who beckoned her Son to expose Himself as our Savior. This first visible public action of turning bland water into delicious wine (representing the joy of the Holy Spirit) would come through the words in direct opposition to Satan: “Do whatever He tells you.” You see? The obedience of conservatives or traditionalists is not the problem. Unless you mean a problem for Satan.
Okay, you want to play that game? Okay, let’s set aside the terms “conservative” and “traditional.” Let’s, as Dr. Alice von Hildebrand suggests, start talking about “those who kept a sense of the supernatural and those who have lost it” …
Now let us abolish the terms “conservative” or “liberal”, the terms “left” and “right” which are secularistic. I suggest that we say from now on “those who have kept the sense of the supernatural and those who have lost it”. That is the great divide, that is the essence.
Do you look at the Church and her teaching, whether dogmatic or moral, with a supernatural eye, or do you look at it with secular lenses? That is the divide. Left and right confuses the issue. Let us re-discover the greatness and the beauty of the supernatural and I claim that it is so difficult in the polluted world in which we live, that if we don’t pray for it every single day, we are going to be infected. It is the air that you breathe, the newspaper that you read, the television show that you see, time and again you will see this is a fight and attack on the supernatural.
Dr. Alice von Hildebrand is exactly right, but “those who kept a sense of the supernatural and those who have lost it” is a little long-winded. I prefer to speak of a division between Strong vs. Weak (supernaturally). St. Paul is in full agreement with Dr. Alice von Hildebrand when he wrote,
“Draw your strength from the Lord and His mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. Our battle is not against human forces but against the principalities and powers, the rulers of this world of darkness, the evil spirits in regions above. You must put on the armor of God if you are to resist on the evil day; do all that your duty requires, and hold your ground” (Eph 6:10-12)
As much as dissidents use words such as “tolerance” and “mercy,” they are really looking to weaken our ideas of sin; they are trying to normalize sin as acceptable in this NuChurch. And, this NuChurch is completely devoid of faith in the power of God.
In his letter to Timothy, St. Paul warns of these times:
“But understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days. People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them” (2 Timothy 3:1-5).
Unless and until we wake up to understand that these dissidents who mock “Strong Catholicism” are, in fact, promoting a faithless, Satanic (Do what thou wilt) Church that denies the power of God, we will never be restored.
