We live during the time of the Great Apostasy foretold in Holy Scripture. That is a fact as plain as the color of the sky, and equally as visible. And yet, there are those, many in fact, who do not know it. How do we unravel this paradox? How can it be that a thing as big and blue as the color of the sky could not be seen? The answer is simple enough, if you give it some thought. The answer is, because the vast majority of those who do not see that we live in the Great Apostasy, have already apostatized from the Faith. 

Apostasy is, by definition, a turning away from the revealed truths of God. But apostasy is more than that. It is also turning away from God as such, in the sense that one does not believe that God is God, that an almighty being created the world and the people in it for a purpose. What so often happens is that people either are born into a family that has already apostatized or the individual child who becomes an adult, apostatizes in adulthood. In my case, it is both. 

I was born into a heathen household. My father didn’t believe in anything so far as I was made aware. I was estranged from my mother, on account of her mental illness, so what she believed or why, I do not really know. She was born Catholic, raised in a Catholic school (Novus Ordo), but by the time she became an adult, she had longed since forgotten what it meant to be Catholic. I think she dabbled in Native American mysticism—in other words, paganism. She has since come around to reading the Baltimore Catechism with me, which I am very excited about. My father died when I was sixteen, and died presumably without baptism or the desire thereof, and outside the Catholic Church. I pray that Our Lady of the Holy Rosary intercede on his behalf at the time leading up to his death, that he in fact experienced a conversion. That is my hope and prayer. 

Such were my non-religious parents. Coming into my teens, I was curious about God, and the world, and about myself. I had the grace already then of a philosophical and I dare say theological or at least a religious notion of existence. That is what ultimately compelled me to conversion and to be baptized. I believe it was a grace from the Mother of God who interceded for me, and has brought me to where I am now, in the wilderness with her during the Apocalypse. 

I was baptized, converted to what I believed was the Catholic Church, and entered into life with my wife (a cradle “Catholic”), joining the Navy, and eventually going to university to study philosophy at the Catholic University of America, a once-prestigious and Catholic research institution, but now a den of thieves and robbers and “Saint” John Paul II the Great enthusiasts. (You are probably wondering what on Earth any of this has to do with Apostasy. Just hold your horses and be patient. It is about to all click.)

While at University, I had the pleasure of talking philosophy with the seminarians there, who lived just up the hill very close if not on campus in a seminary dedicated to John Paul II. I guess their spirituality and theological and philosophical identity was modeled around him. Now, without wanting either to lose you or bore you, I will only briefly explain what made John Paul II philosophically menacing as well as dreadful theologically. You see, Wojtyla was a personalist, which means simply, he referred all philosophical investigations back to the person, to the experience of the person as such. Hence, objective truth became possible to discuss only in light of the person. In times of old, that is, during the Apostolic age of the Church Fathers and down through to the Medieval period with St. Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism, which is really just Aristotelianism applied to the revealed truths of the Catholic Faith, objective truth was not referred to the person at all. Why would it be? The sky is blue, whether there is a person to see it or not, no? 

Anyway, John Paul II was the superstar at The Catholic University of America, even though the School of Philosophy was housed in a building called Aquinas Hall. And his philosophical method had been the standard pretty much since the Second Vatican Council. That is because even Wojtyla had a teacher, or rather teachers: the phenomenologists, who changed the philosophical (and consequently, theological) landscape of the 1900s. There was a faction afoot, or as Cardinal Manning put it, a crisis, in his book, Present Crisis of the Holy See, which actually preceded phenomenology. That was the Pantheists of the post-reformational era, that is, during the Enlightenment period. It wasn’t enough to be heretic anymore. One had to be free, not just from the Church and the Pope, but from the crushing reality that God was God, and man was merely man. Hence, the so-called enlightenment period, in which God was confounded with His creation, and made one with matter. 

We may scoff at such ridiculous notions now, but the fact is, that pretty much everyone believes this, that God is in creation, indeed that creation is God. Catholics don’t, obviously, but those who have revolted against God, those who have apostatized do. Remember how I said that, with the Medieval Church and world, the truth was objective? Well, after Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers, the world and truth became subjective. The sky wasn’t blue anymore. Rather, it was blue because we saw it as such. We weren’t subject to God or the Church, rather we were subject because we merely thought so. Thus, Pandora’s Box let out the evil of Pantheism, the belief that all was God, including ourselves, and our own little thoughts, which were but the expression of the Great Deity evolving itself like a great big origami frog. 

“Galaxy Hair”

Who can deny this is what we see today? Blue-hair, baby-murderer, and Novus Ordo Missae attendee have far more in common than is typically thought. Each in their way believe that their own preference for how things ought to be is the true one. The blue-haired (or green or purple haired person) is in revolt against nature. The would-be beautiful brunette or blonde is saturated with the delusional notion that coloring her hair will objectively make her beautiful—as if beauty had nothing to do with truth in the objective order of things. The woman who seeks an abortion destroys the life she helps to create, thereby revolting against nature at the most fundamental level, that of life. She thwarts her very act, because the act of procreation has no meaning now apart from what her desire is. Thus, her desire and the meaning of her acts become one. Her actions only have meaning if she means them, and in the manner she means them. Thus, abortion isn’t murderer, it isn’t taking of another human life, because human life is meaningless to her. The only life that matters or means anything is her own. She has become God, whose will is truth. (I do not blame the poor women who think such and do such evil against their own children. Not that they are not culpable for their sins, but that I blame the men more, both those who help procreate the life they murder, and also the philosophers who made such madness even possible.) 

Now, as to the Novus Ordo Missae attendees; how in the world are they Pantheists? They are Pantheists because they worship Man as such, not God. All the Antipopes of the past seventy years denied the Incarnation. But John Paul II, in a special and snake-like way, denied the Incarnation by really just making it into Pantheism.

The heretical Second Vatican Council taught: “Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him [Christ], has been raised in us also [eo ipso etiam in nobis] to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man.” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 22, as quoted from TraditionalMass). 

In his pseudo-encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, John Paul II offers an authoritative interpretation of the passage:

“…the mystery [of the Redemption] in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of his mother,” (as quoted and emphasized by TraditionalMass).  

In the article quoted from above, the author continues: 

“It is the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and of the impeccability of man! This is why Paul VI on December 7, 1965 in his closing speech of the Council said, ‘We more than anyone else have the cult of man.’ The cult of man is precisely, according to Saint Pius X, the distinctive sign of the Antichrist! (E Supremi Apostolatu) And Montini continued in this famous discourse: ‘The Religion of God made man has met the religion of man who has become God. What happened? A shock, a fight, an anathema: all this could have happened, but in fact did not happen…’”

“This is an explicit profession of pantheism. For pantheism, the world and God make a single thing. Acosmic pantheism (mystico-religious pantheism) is the reduction of the world to God. The world is absorbed in God, and is nothing more than an ensemble of manifestations of God which have no permanent substance distinct from God. Thus God is the substance of ‘Soul of the world.’” (from TraditionalMass). 

Those who attend the New Mass believe this, even if they do not understand that that is what they believe. Lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed. The New Mass is a worship service of man. Work of Human Hands, a historical and theological analysis of Paul VI’s worship service would be a good read to understand just how messed up the New Mass is. Though written by Anthony Cekada, a pretender Catholic priest (recently passed, requiescat in pace) who received his priestly formation from the schismatic and heretical seminary of Lefebvre, and who I doubt was even really a priest at all, let alone Catholic, nevertheless was a strong scholar of the liturgy. Thus, I recommend his book but not the man. But suffice it here to say that the New Mass is demonstrably a worship service of man as God. The happy-clappy music, which is about as sacred as a U2 song, is one bit of evidence. If the music were actually in service to God, it would sound like it, instead of music which sounds like it is contrived to make people feel happy and glad to be wasting their time at a Sunday meet and greet service. The versus populum of the celebrant is another datum, which orients the priest to the people and not to God. Anybody with eyes can see the difference between a priest who faces the altar and tabernacle alone, addressing his prayers thereat, and a man dressed up in ugly green vestments (why are they so ugly?) who prays at the people, who is actually talking to the people, though he feigns talking to God, just as the people think they are praying to God, but they are really just talking to themselves.  

Thus we see how those who cannot see the sky is blue cannot see that they think they are God. The worship of man has made man as worthless as man. We may never get back out of this pit of pantheism into which humanity has fallen, out into the bright sunshine of Medieval Scholasticism, back into the daylight of things being what they are, not because we believe or think them so, but because God does. But since we find ourselves down here anyway, we might as well tell people that what they see and hear are but shadows and echos of reality. Truth is not here. They have taken Him. In the words of Eugene Cardinal Pacelli, who would be our last Holy Father, Pope Pius XII:   

“I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a Divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul…I hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the true Faith of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past…A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, ‘Where have they taken Him?’”