"Watch ye, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak." Matt 26:41-43
"For it is written: As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God." Romans 14:11
Have we crowned the serpent rather than bent the knee to Christ the King? Indeed we have, and we are paying for it. The current events are so clearly a chastisement that to hear Catholics deny this is just astonishing. Has rationalism so penetrated the Faith, and blind technocratic optimism so taken the place of our awareness of sin and the need for our own personal reparation that we do not know how to read the signs of the times? Sin is not an individual thing which only affects individuals. It affects us as a body. We have forgotten this, or attempted to bury the knowledge of it. Part of the greatness of Fyodor Dostoevsky is his understanding of this. “In sinning,” Dostoevsky wrote in Demons, “each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.”.
This corporate nature of sin is revealed in the paralysing effects it has on the goods of community. Without a doubt we are witnessing the echo of this paralysis in the closing down of our institutions and countries because of a silent and invisible enemy.
Catholic prophecy points quite decisively to certain events which must occur before the end times. Our Lady has come countless times to warn us of the chastisement that awaits if we persist in sin. Many many times over the last 200 years in many different places her message has been the same - repentance, reparation for our own and others' sins, and praying the rosary. At perhaps her most publicly significant apparition, Fatima, she showed a vision of hell to the three children and said that many souls go there because of sins of impurity. She said she wanted to establish in the world devotion to her Immaculate Heart, and for Russia to be consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart. She said that Russia would 'spread its errors throughout the world', and the consecration would be the antidote to the spread of this poison.
Well, the errors have spread, and our nations and societies become progressively more paralysed by sin. The tempest blows and the boat is tossed about and we cry out. We can do small things; consecrate ourselves and our families to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and nations are also doing this, realising that Christ must reign, or we shall build a kingdom of darkness and thus condemn ourselves and our societies to a spiritual death.
