Blog to discuss the book "The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation" and current events that point to the events described therein.
As predicted in the Apocalypse - Letter by Letter, by Steven Paul, the old Roman Empire would one day be reconstituted. By the Lisbon Treaty, agreed to now by the last holdout, that day has come. Already the warning signs of the coming Christian persecution are there. As Europe has abandoned its Christian roots and the Church has become weak, believers are now a minority with no rights under the new constitution. They will soon find themselves victims of hate crimes laws, speech restrictions and even mob rule.
All that is lacking from the prophecy is a head for the beast. Stay tuned...
Czech Republic Leader Signs Lisbon - No More Barriers to New European Superstate By Hilary White PRAGUE, November 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, signed the Lisbon Treaty at 3 p.m. Central European Time today, the last leader of the European Union's 27 members states to do so. This removes the last barrier to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the document that is said to be effectively identical to the European Constitution that was defeated by public votes in France and the Netherlands in 2005. Klaus, the eurosceptic leader of the former Soviet bloc country, has warned repeatedly against Lisbon's encroachments on national sovereignty and democracy, calling the project of a "united Europe" a return to a leftist tyranny. Since the start of the battle over Lisbon, Klaus has warned that ratification of the Treaty would signal the end of his and all European countries as independent sovereign states.
After the Yes vote in last month's Irish referendum, Klaus' opposition to Lisbon was the last barrier to the full implementation of the agreement that pro-life advocates have warned will likely result in the loss of the right of countries to pass laws protecting the unborn and elderly from abortion and euthanasia. Pro-life leaders in Ireland warned that under the Treaty the laws of member states will be interpreted not through that state's courts, but by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that is under no legal obligation to consider any other law besides EU law. Today the anti-Christian, secularist leanings of the EU's institutions were illustrated when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that crucifixes must be removed from Italian state schools. In response to a complaint from an Italian woman in Padua, the Strasburg court ruled, "The presence of the crucifix ... could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion."
The court ruled that the Italian state is to "refrain from imposing beliefs in premises where individuals were dependent on it." Campaigners have warned that this type of ruling under Lisbon's terms would become binding on all member states, ushering in the effective repression in all of Europe of public expressions of Christianity or any other belief that opposes the prevailing official European secularism.
In a 2005 speech, Klaus wondered if the former communist countries were not risking falling into "another blind alley of regulated society, of unproductive welfare state, of brave new world of European social democratism and of empty and artificial Europeanism." Klaus's capitulation was anticipated at last week's EU summit, when French President Nicholas Sarkozy said, "The Lisbon Treaty will enter into force doubtless as early as December 1."
'SPIRIT OF ANTI-CHRIST' IS BEST DEFINED NOT AS SECULAR SPIRIT BUT ONE FULL OF HATRED
From SpiritDaily.com
We are out of balance when we focus too much on evil, at the same time that we are in peril when we ignore it.
There is but one recourse: the Holy Spirit.
At Christmastime, we think (or should think) of Christ; in our time we are also forced to ponder the opposite spirit (for the spirit of anti-christ is rising).
Just what is the "spirit of anti-christ"? How, in our special times, is it manifesting? How do we detect it?
More than anything, the spirit of anti-christ is in those who show direct vitriol toward religion and specifically Catholicism and Christianity. Simply put, it is truculence aimed directly at Jesus.
Day after day, this time of year -- as a new "tradition" -- there are stories about the Infant kidnapped from a Nativity here, or a Nativity disallowed there, or a statue of Jesus found hanging. There are the anti-Catholic jokes. There is the bias. There are universities where they won't even allow Santa! The spirit of anti-christ is the spirit of militant secular humanism, and finds its extreme in satanism.
Anti-christ is most manifest in atheism but is not confined to non-believers. Those of religious faith who bristle at the mention of Christ are obviously of this spirit -- or at least influenced by it. Direct animosity toward Christians (as seen currently and urgently in India) is what would balloon into a challenge unlike any seen since the early-century martyrs.
It is one thing to see the rise of homosexual rights; it is another to watch gay demonstrators with signs that display stark anti-Christian hatred.
That spirit extends across sexual, economic, and cultural boundaries.
In Mexico, Playboy magazine came out with a cover depicting a nude model but for a Virgin-like veil (on the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which of course is centered in Mexico). That is the spirit of anti-christ because it went beyond the prurient and into the realm of the blasphemous, which spells hatred. Anti-christ is the spirit of lust where Christianity is the spirit of love. Catholics are disdained by certain writers in magazines like Time while a hard-core pornographer is exalted as a nice old man when he dies. The spirit of anti-christ reverses everything, so that good is evil and evil is good. It spells the word "live" backwards.
"Want proof that hate is driving this assault?" asks a group that fights Catholic bigotry. "The head of the ACLU in New Hampshire, Claire Ebel, advises that if crèches are allowed in parks, it is permissible 'for a display of satanic ritual.' And this hatred of Christmas is not exclusive to the U.S. In England, Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary called Christmas 'evil' in a recent sermon. No wonder they are banning words like 'bishop,' 'chapel,' 'monk' and 'nun' from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. And all of this is being endorsed, if not promoted, by self-hating Christians."
Scientists in America and politicians in the new, unified Europe, especially, are hankering for the day when they will be able to exert a coordinated purge of Jesus. They are refashioning nature. They are redefining spirit. The confessional has been replaced by the couch of the psychiatrist. At the same time, there is an unprecedented eruption of those claiming to see peculiar images of Jesus.
Is Heaven countering the attempt to purge Him? Is it hinting at a coming large manifestation? "An unusual phenomenon occurred at my kitchen sink," wrote Antoinette Santangelo of Cedar Knoll, New Jersey. "On this day, before I left my house at one o'clock in the afternoon, I filled my one-year-old grandson's bottle with milk at the sink. I rushed out without noticing that I had dropped a 'clump of milk' on the ledge of the front of the sink, discovering it only upon my return four hours later. Since I had left a pot in the sink, I set out to wash it; however, before I could do so, I felt a strong force pushing me back from the sink. I wondered why this was so strong. After the strong force subsided, I attempted to wash the pot.
"It was then that I noticed the small drop of milk on the front of the sink. Upon closer examination, I was filled with emotion to see the suffering Face of Jesus on this drop of milk. [The next morning] after Mass I showed my father the picture and he immediately saw the image of Jesus' Face clearly and asked if he could follow me home so he could see the sink and picture in the drop of milk. He found it incredible and believed when he saw was truly the face of Jesus."
It is difficult to discern: are these reports -- so numerous -- pareidolia (the imagining of images into natural, coincidental formations), some other type of deception, or signs from Heaven to offset the attempts at stripping Christian supernaturality from the public square? Why does it happen so often -- with the same frequency as statue beheadings, Nativity controversies, and satanic graffiti?
It is a question this hour -- this late hour, at this late time of the year. "Earlier today, a bus taking members of a heavy-metal band, the Red Shore, veered off the Pacific Highway north of Sydney," wrote a viewer at this time precisely a year ago. "The bus rolled several times and slammed into a tree, killing the lead vocalist and one of the road crew. They were on their way to a performance at Sydney University in a double-header with a U.S. 'death-metal' outfit call 'All Shall Perish.' They had called their tour, 'Christmas Carnage.'
"Sadly, this title has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Coincidence speaks to us. It heralds. It tries to warn. In the quiet of night, in the silence, we take it to the Infant.
Note: While there is truth in what the Cardinal says, asking the laity to lead seems a reversal of responsibility in the hierarchical Church. But he means lead in daily worldly affairs, not ecclesial ones. The problem is that the grossly inadequate and ineffective teaching of the faithful for the past 40 years has left a laity that is illiterate in what the Church stands for. A serious reform of the type St. Francis initiated, or more starkly St. Vincent Ferrer warned of is needed.
Vatican Cardinal: "A New World Order is Gaining Ground"
By John-Henry Westen
ROME, November 20, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Speaking at the opening of the 23rd plenary assembly for the Pontifical Council for the Laity, the president of the Council, Cardinal Stanislaw Rylko, warned, "The idea of creating a 'new man' completely detached from the Judeo-Christian tradition, a new 'world order,' a new 'global ethic,' is gaining ground."
According to the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the cardinal denounced the "dictatorship of relativism," rampant in Western societies, in which there is a growing "anti-Christian attitude" that makes "attacks on Christians, and particular on Catholics, pass off as politically correct."
Speaking of Christians today he said, "Our true problem is not being a minority, but rather having voluntarily become marginal, irrelevant, because of our lack of courage, so that we will be left alone, because of our mediocrity." "For Christians," Cardinal Rylko added, "the moment has arrived to free themselves from a false inferiority complex ... to be valiant witnesses of Christ."
This is, he said, the "hour of the laity," to take on their "responsibility in the diverse fields of public life, from politics to the promotion of life and family, from work to the economy, from education to the formation of youth."
He warned, however, that such faithfulness would come at a personal cost. "Whoever wants to live and act according to the Gospel of Christ has to pay a price, even in the highly liberal societies of the West," he said.
Michael O'Brien Newsletter Regarding Barack Obama and the Question of the Anti-Christ
All Saints Day, 1 November 2008
Dear Friends, From just north of the border, we Canadians, like other people throughout the world, are observing and praying for the coming federal election in the United States of America. I would prefer to keep private my counsel about political choices, because it is not my country. However, I am receiving letters from American subscribers and visitors to my studio website asking me some rather surprising questions about Barack Obama, related to one of my novels.
During the past year I have read a number of his pronouncements, and saw the smoke and mirrors beneath the rhetoric, but couldn't understand why everyone south of the border (the other south of the border, the 49th parallel) was getting so excited about him, both pro and con. Then a few weeks ago a German friend called me immediately after Obama's speech in Berlin, to say that the presidential candidate had mesmerized the crowds, and that a commentator on German television had said: "We have just heard the next President of the United States...and the future President of the World." My friend felt that Obama bore an uncanny resemblance to the fictional character of the President in my novel Father Elijah. I have received several other letters saying the same thing and asking what I thought about it.
From my own reading of Obama's declarations and stated positions, I knew he was an ultra-liberal, a social revolutionary with visionary pretensions. But the Antichrist? No, not possible, I thought. I felt that he was too shallow a man to be the Son of Perdition, the Man of Sin, the Beast of the Book of Revelation. And I still think so. Obama is a crowd-pleaser with just the right ethos of idealistic crusader. That the crusade and the banners under which it marches are evil does not automatically prove that he is the Antichrist.
But now that I have seen the video of the Berlin speech I think there is more here than meets the eye. He is indeed a powerful manipulator of crowds, even as he appears ever so humble and wholesomely charming. I doubt that he is the long-prophesied ruler of the world, but I also believe that he is a carrier of a deadly moral virus, indeed a kind of anti-apostle spreading concepts and agendas that are not only anti-Christ but anti-human as well. In this sense he is of the spirit of Antichrist (perhaps without knowing it), and probably is one of several key figures in the world who (knowingly or unknowingly) will be instrumental in ushering in the time of great trial for the Church under its last and worst persecution, amidst the numerous other tribulations prophesied in the books of Daniel and Revelation, and letters of St Paul, St. John, and St. Peter.
Of course the mystique that has grown up around him is endlessly reinforced by the liberal media, which presents him to us as a high-minded humanist, a kind of secular messiah (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 675). Yet when all the rhetoric is boiled down to its substance, the man is advocating unlimited state-sanctioned murder, and compounds it by indulging in habitual falsehood. He is well accustomed to playing loose with the truth whenever it is expedient for him to do so; or else he is the victim of the largest memory lapses in recorded history; or perhaps he is just not careful about how he expresses things——a blurring or selectivity regarding facts for the purpose of aggrandizing his public image. There is a controversy currently raging in the (admittedly unreliable) forum of the internet, prompted by an African-American talk show host in Los Angeles who listed 39 significant details that Barack Obama claimed were facts about himself, but on further investigation were proved to be simply untrue. There has been some wild-fire debunking of the debunking, and then more counter-debunking, but it remains obvious that forthrightness and clarity are not major concerns in the Obama camp.
What are we to make of a man who has appeared out of semi-obscurity and become, nearly overnight, so very much an idol of the popular imagination? That he intends to become the most effective advocate of murder of the unborn ever seen in America should give us pause. Murder and lies are as old as the lands east of Eden, of course, but when they are charmingly packaged, proposed as reasonable and just policies (with a smile, a resonant voice, and an appealing flash of the eyes), one begins to wonder just what is afoot in the modern age. It brings to mind a passage from the first Act of Shakespeare's Hamlet:
"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..."
The line is from a scene where prince Hamlet has just encountered the ghost of his father, who informs his son that he was poisoned by his own brother Claudius (the "smiling, damned villain"), who after murdering him, seized the king's crown and his queen.
Barack Obama is an image-maker, creating his own myth as he goes along. This would be a sad defect in any human being, but it takes on ominous proportions in a person who may become, after November 4th, one of the most powerful figures in the world. How is it possible that such a tragic turn of events may come about, if indeed a majority of Americans choose to believe the smile and the myth? Why is it that so many people have come to believe that a mirage is reality, even destiny? Do pro-Obama voters hanker for a world figure who would heal old divisions between races and religions, thus heralding a new age for mankind? During this time of near intolerable tensions, does he appear to be the one who can reconcile Islam and Christianity, Africa and America, occident and orient, black and white, rich and poor? Do they see his racial origins as a symbolic victory over the history of racial oppression? Do they see in him the good-hearted "under-dog", the gutsy street fighter who agitates for the rights of the "little guy," whose meteoric rise to a position of maximum influence represents themselves enthroned at last in the high seat of power? Is this why they ignore his every grave fault and hungrily consume his vague idealist platitudes as if these were a kind of new gospel for the third millennium? Our hero. Our visionary. Our Great Friend and spokesman in the forum of the world?
Clearly, contemporary man needs heroes. But why not choose a genuine one, why not look a little deeper and work a little harder to find a man of courage and principle, and if it helps in the historical healing process, why not a very different kind of black man, say a person like Alan Keyes, a scholar, former ambassador, experienced in different levels of government, and (it might be added) an African-American married to a woman from India. Moreover, he is a devout Catholic who believes in moral absolutes and has amply proved that he will stand firm to defend them regardless of the cost to his own career. He knows that kings and presidents cannot usurp the natural law, the moral order of the universe, without bringing down judgment upon their nations. But it need not be Keyes. It might be any number of other men and women of clear thought and clear principle. Surely there are "Ten Just Men" still out there somewhere in America. So why Obama? And why does he rise and rise as his mouth smiles and smiles, exuding sincerity as he speaks lies and death?
And why, most horribly, most shamefully, are so many Christians of malformed or unformed conscience supporting him? Is it because they have never been clearly instructed in the truth, never understood the foundation upon which the moral cosmos is built? Is morality for them merely another system of abstract "values" in a crowded playing field of such systems, from which one may pick and choose? In the case of Catholics, for example, have they been blinded by a diet of theological nuances and deadly little loopholes offered to them by the committees of national episcopal conferences — committees that have absolutely no authority over Catholics, yet which are widely revered as a kind of alternative Magisterium? Have they been deadened by a habitual dismissing or dissembling of the solid teaching given to them by the universal Church under Peter? Have they grown accustomed to listening to opinion shapers who tell them that certain excellent apostolic Bishops in America who teach the truth without compromise are merely hidebound reactionaries, moralistic extremists, contemporary manifestations of those old boogymen who still haunt the American psyche — the Chillingworths and Dimmesdales and the judges in The Scarlet Letter? And so it goes, this over-reaction to Puritanism played out over centuries, an over-reaction that breeds tragedies a thousand times worse than Salem's. Lies compounding on lies, and it all floats on an ocean of spilled innocent blood. And who can gaze at that ocean (or be splashed by it) without coming to a radical choice: One either turns away into a deeper state of denial, or one turns heart and mind toward the splendor of Truth, and changes one's life accordingly.
Is this why many of our Catholic people have become impulse-driven impressionists? Of course, the blindness is not due to the failure of pastors alone. The Ministry of Disinformation (by which I mean most modern media) has played a major role. There is also the erosion of truth in the education systems, combined with the gradual confusion and weakening of conscience through our addiction to the "soma" drugs supplied by the entertainment industry. Other factors may be the war in Iraq, or Republican economics, or the Bush administration, or the structure of Capitalism itself, or any number of prudential questions in the sociopolitical order, all of which are presently tangled nests of moral dilemma. But why do they not see that these questions are secondary to the fundamental issue of life itself? Why would they replace one reigning oligarchy with another kind of oligarchy — moreover, one that would kill vast numbers of its own citizens?
"I call on heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live...." (Deuteronomy 30:19)
May God bless and guide you, in Jesus our Saviour, with prayers and fasting,
