The Assault Has Begun

There are signs that the secular world here in America is moving towards diminishing the Catholic Church and its presence in the public arena. The current administration is forcing it's ideology and culture of death and an ignorant public is standing by idly. I have said it before and I will repeat it here. There will come a time, maybe not in my lifetime but soon thereafter when Catholics will be hunted down, imprisoned, and every power will seek to silence and destroy the Church. If you can't see that you are not looking at the world correctly. Catholics put this current administration in power and they will have to live with that fact. Catechesis has been so poor in the last few generations that we have many ignorant or indifferent Catholics who do not either know their faith nor recognized that things happening will jeopardize the practice of it in the future. Now, Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church and I believe that. I also believe that hell is about to unleash its power. The Catholic Church will be the last obstacle to the total occupation of the hearts and minds of men which is the goal of secularism. The only thing that can change this is the laity and a concerted effort to better catechize future generations. back in 1851 John Henry Newman wrote "What I desiderate in Catholics is the gift of bringing out what their religion is — I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity — I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism and where lies the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory. I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion" Catholic men and women have to restore to the next generation what it means to have this great Faith and to safeguard it against the daily pounding from the secular world. That in itself will not prevent the impending persecution but will allow the seeds for the future revival that will assuredly happen.