Dark Clouds over the Soul

From deep in the cellars come rumblings from time to time. There a Great Gift lays protected. So protected that the folks in the bars and rooms above barely acknowledge its existence. And it has seen plenty in its time.

"Keep your eye on the Maracas"

Its the sort of exhortation you would expect in say, the Music room.

It is not simply a Religious Icon but a reminder of a possibility, and of the future of individual souls. It is as old as Christianity itself which has always had forces ranged against it. Even a thinking person rarely gives much time and thought as to just why a Creed that asks only that one Loves God and one's fellow Man should be so opposed. But opposed it is.

The maracas have spun out of the hand and are whacking us in the maracas.

 We are supposed to be looking Up and Out and In, not just at our loins.

Christianity has been undermined from inside too. Its Institutionalised manifestations have fractured over half a millennium. The original 'One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic' Church is riven with the sex-obsessed, though these days they count amongst their number not just the rigidly pious and chaste but the most vile of predatory creatures ever to crawl from the Pit.

The Church that Christ built found early resistance from Evil in Roman form until it converted that society, only to have a multitude of ego-maniacs in the middle ages think they could do better.  The gates of Hell may well not prevail against the Church but in the meantime, being as that Church was established by Christ Himself, it is Evil's Prime Target and it is raging against it.  Evil's infiltration led many a monk astray . 'Protest' begat a multitude of 'alternatives'.

To these multitudes of 'Protestants', counting amongst their congregations many fine people,  a new book turns and brings us up to date.  The thesis is that protestant-ism has diluted the chastity message, taking the holiness from marriage and procreation, and led inexorably to a flood of evil.

Carlson’s narrative (In the Godly Seed) covers American Protestants since they were the ones to break with the Christian consensus on sex and marriage. In fact, the story goes all the way back to the early Christian church, but only briefly. Carlson establishes that the church fathers, particularly Augustine, believed and taught that the purpose of marriage was procreation. This view prevailed through the medieval era and down to the Protestant Reformation, when leading Protestants such as Martin Luther and John Calvin reaffirmed what the Western church had always taught about marriage and sex, minus the part about marriage as a sacrament.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/godly_seed

From small cuts here and there for personal aggrandizement and gain, to a blood-letting in due course. The 'reduction' of Christianity has progressed largely through the efforts of those who purport to profess it. First in Europe and then in America.

And the door was opened to not simply individual men's 'interpretation' but downright surgical precision butchery. Just as the Evil force, always understood to be a semi-masculine Prince of Lies, so in more modern times has Evil transmorgrified into the Princess of Lies.

Feminism has had a marked impact, especially in the protestant churches. The many good people within them are led astray. Women in particular but so many men also.

Born in 1879 in Corning, New York, (Margaret) Sanger scored early victories and gained publicity during the 1920s in skirmishes with Roman Catholics on contraception and birth control.  

But she also solicited support from Protestant ministers through such organizations as the American Eugenics Society.  

This body in 1925 formed a Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen, a group that included such high-profile ministers or church leaders as the Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick (arguably the most popular preacher in the United States), Charles Clayton Morrison (editor of The Christian Century), and S. Parkes Cadman (president of the FCC). At a time when a growing number of Americans feared that society would soon be overwhelmed by immigrants and defective persons,

the appeal of eugenics was decisive

in justifying the mainline Protestant break with almost two millennia of Christian teaching on contraception and birth control.

Calumnies abound. Everyone and his 'new religious' dog in the 15C and 16C revelled in being 'anti-Catholic' conveniently forgetting just who started it. Started the Catholic Church, that is.  Finding fault became a 'public service' as well as saving one's neck on the executioner's block. Service to Kings who wanted their own worship and power. It bred a sort of competitive anti-Catholicism.

Repeat calumnies enough and they become 'conventional wisdom'.  Disdain Catholics enough and soon even good people do it and accept the myths and lies. The immense longevity of the 'Reformation' agitprop is astonishing and bodes ill for the even more concerted efforts of Marxism in this past century. Even today Catholics in England are forbidden to hold specific offices of State.
Protestantism is predominantly responsible for carrying this agitprop forward.
Men and freedom will continue to be reviled in our lifetime and it will get worse.

But the Catholic Church is the last great bastion   defending the value of Life

and the Sanctity of the Family.

A sheer hatred of life itself has developed in the hearts of anti-Catholics. Especially the most vulnerable of lives.

Carlson’s story does not stop there but extends to the more recent sexual revolution and includes a fascinating chapter on the evangelical Protestants who rallied around their best-known preacher, Billy Graham, another Baptist. The predecessors of evangelicals, the fundamentalists, had generally followed in Comstock’s path and opposed birth control, contraception, and challenges to traditional motherhood. But by the late 1950s, fears about a global population explosion laced with residues of the old anti-Catholicism led evangelical leaders to abandon Comstock. A father of five,

 

Graham personally voiced opposition to Humanae Vitae and said,  

“I believe in planned parenthood.”

 

And at a 1968 consultation sponsored by the magazine he helped to found, Christianity Today, evangelical leaders endorsed an astonishing set of “affirmations” in favor of population control, contraception, and even abortion.  

As Carlson claimed, evangelical Protestants had “out-libertined” liberal Protestants.

Now we have abortion, the deliberate murder of babies, human beings, having Governmental approval and encouragement. Billy Graham's favoured exterminators have murdered over 50 Million American babies since its landmark win in Roe vs Wade.

But has the pendulum of  the fickle religious started on its back-swing? 

 While the Catholic Church is busy with the diabolical Virus of Paedophiles and Homosexuals/sodomites/buggers in its ranks and even in the Vatican corridors, some revision is happening with the Protestants.

Just as surprising has been the evangelical about-face on Catholicism, a development that Carlson does not pursue. Because of fears of being swamped by Roman Catholics in earlier times, many Protestants embraced the benefits of birth control. However, Protestants had few vehicles for reducing birthrates among Roman Catholics aside from making contraceptives available. But in a climate where Rome still forbade contraception, all Protestants wound up doing was making contraceptives available to their own, which in turn sent Protestant birthrates plummeting.

But after seeing the enormities of legalized abortion, Protestants have taken a second look at Roman Catholics and now, through initiatives such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together, cooperate fully with Rome as an ally.

Protestants and Roman Catholics may still not see eye-to-eye upon important theological matters, but Carlson’s book is an effective reminder that sex, marriage, and demographics are more important for Protestant-Catholic relations in the United States than sacraments, relics, or doctrines such as justification by faith alone.

And here the rumblings from the Cellar grow even more grim.

The Sacraments are a Gift. They are vehicles of Grace. The essence of God whereby we are drawn to Him. Like the Grail itself is the essence of God made man and the route to a man's understanding of his own essential Manly self.  To simply dismiss them again takes us right back to the original Protestants.

Catholics have no business in 'co-operating' with Protestants in 'ecumenism'. Too many 'isms'. They need to be rescuing them from egocentric heresies and converting them by good example. The example has always been there regardless of some of its 'adherents' sullying the Sacred. Fortunately Life has its own way of providing example.

Is Protestantism in its many forms really an alternative? What a prospect. !

Love the Sinner but not the Sin.

The Tavern succours with its fine bevvies.