Blog:Visions of Modernism Part 3: Prophesies & warnings
** draft under construction **
In my post, Visions of Modernism Part 1: Fátima & sins of the flesh, I reviewed how, when Our Lady of Fatima warned Jacinta, one of the three shepherd children,
The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.[1]
As discussed in the post, the difference between the sinful state of 1917 and today is one of scale not kind, with that scale created by the levers of technology that today dispenses "scandal"[2] with neither limits nor cessation. Bombs are now nuclear. Pornography is now virtual.
While of a kind, albeit on a vast scale, we have also changed the degree of sin. Contraception makes even conjugial sex sinful. Pornography entices, then numbs its viewers to the despicable and cruel. Advertising leverages our concupiscence, targeting even "the little ones." We carry instruments of sin in our pockets, and our educators, politicians, and professionals are "scandalous" not from the public outrage they may or ought to cause, as the modern world defines it, but from the sin they lead others to.[3]
Sin has always been the rule and not the exception, but within my lifetime it has gone from the unspoken to the entirely public.
How did we get here?
I heard an interesting statistic, that the percentage of confessed atheists of 1970 in America, 3%, is now up to 4%. You'd think it'd be far higher, until you realize that a far higher portion of the other 96%, who, to some extent profess belief in a higher power or "spirituality," don't believe in the living God. The academics will attribute the decline in denominational faith to decline in trust in institutions, both secular and religious[4] and growth in "personal autonomy" in recent generations.[5]
Sorry, academics, because, to quote Lynyrd Skynryd, "Watergate does not bother me." The reference to "personal autonomy is closer to the truth, but only as an observation and not causal explanation: "how valuing personal autonomy generally and autonomy in the sphere of sex and drugs specifically explain generational differences..."[6] The authors assert that changes in "attitudes regarding sex and drugs" resulting from the1960s "culture shock" has led to divergent political identification, left and right, which then impacts religious affiliation.[7]
The authors present data that show that since 1990, self-identified liberals and moderates have increasingly stated "no religious preference," while degrees of self-identified conservatives have shown moderate increases in that identification. Political "moderates" demonstrate the highest divergence, trending similarly with "slightly conservatives" to a strong divergence upward starting in the 1990s.[8]
There are a number of problems with aligning political and religious preferences, and the authors get into rather impressive statistical analysis to accommodate political preference change over time. Still, "moderate" in 1972 is vastly different from whatever that may mean today. These are labels that carry no particular meaning other than political ambiguity, which regularly swings left and right.
But the author's real thesis is that "political affiliation" and not "secularization" has led to the significant increase in the "nones" category of those professing no religious affiliation. Consistent with the statistic I heard about the unchanging percentages of self-proclaimed atheists, most of these "nones" cling to some degree of spirituality.
The authors' point is that longstanding sociological explanations of growing non-religiosity as the result of "secularization," itself the result of "modernization," cannot explain the growing numbers of "nones" who still believe in a god.The argument is, literally academic:
Secularization may have once been a rather specific set of hypotheses, but over time its meaning has defused to the point where almost any downtrend in a religious indicator counts as evidence of it. We take a rather textbook slant on it here, stipulating that for secularization to explain the rise of the “nones,” the sequence must accord with the original theory. First, modernization induces people to lose faith in God and religion. Then, as religion is no longer meaningful, they stop identifying with it. [9]
They state that the "classic version" of the secularization hypothesis is that "modernization, reason, and science would banish traditional explanations of the material world," thereby replacing religion.[10] In their view, that the "nones" maintain religiosity negates the hypothesis.
Well, the authors don't consult Scripture. If they did, they would understand that belief in sexual "autonomy" is entirely inconsistent with God's Word. Worse, they explain away the decline in liberal church attendance to "alienation and not action,"[11] i.e., people just aren't interested in going to church but still maintain their religious belief.
In the conclusion, however, the authors fully reveal themselves,
If some churches were to diversify their message, appealing to issues beyond sexual politics, perhaps the alienated liberals might think about church again.[12]
"Empty" pews
The problem facing our leftist evangelists is that in today's world there's nothing left to give to God. Caesar has it all. Why bother going to church to hear about homosexuality and abortion when you hear all about it everywhere else? Our friends in the academy miss that "Holy" means "set apart," and when a church merely regurgitates the rest of society, there is nothing holy in it.
The libertines who complain about clerical hypocrisy ignore the fact that hypocrisy only exists in the face of a standard. The Left's greatest achievement is to remove hypocrisy altogether. It's not just the double standards of holding others to rules you don't observe yourself, it's the absence of standards altogether that magically remove the stains of hypocrisy. The only hypocrites are those with standards, and, of course, we can't leave all it to them to judge themselves.
When pews are filled they are filled with sinners. Every empty pew is a marker for an unrepentant sinner.
External v. internal charity
Saint Pope John Paul II was rightly focused on ending the Soviet Union, and by his own words Mary of Fatima << what'd he say?
While John Paul II presided over the post-Soviet transition, Benedict XVI arrived to an arguably more spiritually precarious world, which two of his predecessors from before Fatima saw coming and warned against loudly. Certainly, their warnings were drowned out by the "Great War" during which Mary arrived to announce two others, far worse than the first, the Second World War, of course -- and Communism.
> Francis?
Let's put to bed any dismissal of communism's relative damage to humanity versus the two global wars is meaningless, as these are essentially the same event, and of the same cause: modernism.
Saint Anthony Mary Claret
From the Autobiography of Saint Anthony Mary Claret,
On September 23 [1859], at 7:30 in the morning, the Lord told me, "You shall fly throughout the world or walk with great speed and preach of the great punishments that are approaching." The Lord gave me a deep understanding of those words of the Apocalypse (8:13): "As my vision continued, I heard an eagle flying in mid-heaven cry out in a loud voice, 'Woe, woe, and again woe to the inhabitants of the earth,' because of the three great chastisements that are to come." These chastisements are:
1. Protestantism, communism....
2. The four archdemons that will make fearful inroads: the love of pleasure, the love of money, independence of the mind, independence of the will.
3. The great wars and their consequences.[13]
1859.
Modernism
Mankind didn't need modernism to learn how to slay or starve one another. War, conquest, forced starvation, slavery, and genocide have been the instruments of death following Cain's example. While plague and non-anthropormophic (man-made) starvation may not arise from hate, Satan reaps gleefully during any such time of distress.
As ever, God already explained it all. From Genesis 11:3-5:
They said to one another, “Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire.” They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves;
At least the "sons of man" recognized their limits:
otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.”
> Archie letter
Pius IX Syllabus of errors
PIux X "Lamentabili sane exitu"
See: https://catholicism.org/anthony-claret.html
- ↑ The warning came two years later in Lisbon. See Lucia's Memoirs, p 127
- ↑ Per CCC 2284, Scandal is "an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil"
- ↑ Scandal, as we reviewed in isions of Modernism Part 1: #Scandal,_1917, is "an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil" (CCC 2284)
- ↑ Why Millennials are less religious than older Americans | Pew Research Center
- ↑ Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987-2012 (sociologicalscience.com) (Destination page has link to full article.)
- ↑ Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference The thesis is that the 1990s growth in conservative religious groups caused a more general weaker personal [relgious] identification" (p. 423)
- ↑ p. 424. Also, "The increased tendency to answer no religious affiliation coincided with the polarization of American politics." (p. 425)
- ↑ In 1972, 4% of moderates, slightly conservative and conservatives stated no religious preference; by 2012 it was about 8% of conservatives, 10% of slightly conservatives and about 18% of moderates (figures estimated from the chart here: "Figure 2: No Religious Preference (percent) by Year and Political Views: Adults, United States, 1974–2012," p. 427 and from text p. 443.)
- ↑ p. 428
- ↑ p. 424
- ↑ p. 444
- ↑ p. 444
- ↑ autobio-claret.doc (archive.org)