Five-Hundred-Year Crises in Christendom
Terence J. Hughes, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences and Climate Change
Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate Sciences
University of Maine
Now that we have a Jesuit Pope, I’m reading Malachi Martin’s book, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church. Much of what Martin reports I knew, but not in the detail he provides. Although published in 1987, it is even more pertinent today. Part I ends with Nicaraguan Jesuits living in Communist luxury after Pope John Paul II was shouted down by Sandinista plants during his sermon at the Catholic Mass in Managua, and continuing with catcalls to the end of the Mass. Jesuits in the Leninist-Stalinist Sandinista government had given Daniel Ortega a copy of the sermon in advance. Disruption of the Mass was planned in great detail. The Jesuits were richly rewarded.
Not mentioned in Part I is something I’ve heard for many years. Stalin recognized the power Jesuits had in the Catholic Church, with their “Black Pope” and worldwide network of missionaries in the Third World and so many Jesuit colleges and universities in the First World. So he ordered Soviet agents to infiltrate the Jesuit order at all levels, top to bottom, masquerading as loyal members of the Church until they gained power at all these levels, and then use the traditional Jesuit pattern of deception and cunning that now combined feigned obedience with actual subversion. In short, Stalin used this traditional Jesuitical strategy against the Jesuits themselves. And he succeeded. To prevent that from happening, when Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, he included a fourth vow, after poverty, chastity, and obedience: total loyalty to the Holy Father.
Today Jesuits who adhere to the original pledge of loyalty to the Pope, whomever he may be, have only token representation at the vast majority of Jesuit colleges and universities, if even that, and missionary assignments of loyal Jesuits have been to the fringes of public life worldwide. Here in South Dakota, loyal Jesuits have been banished to Sioux Indian reservations, where alcoholism and drugs combine with rampant diabetes to decimate family life and leave Indian youth bereft of hope. Loyal Jesuits live in the Catacombs of culture today. In Nicaragua, pushback to the Sandinista Communists came from Ronald Reagan, not John Paul II.
Since the time of Christ, unity in His Church has been fragmented about every 500 years. Early heresies included the Arian heresy adopted by all Germanic tribes invading the Roman Empire except the Franks, Angles, and Saxons, who accepted Roman Christianity and founded enduring states. The others vanished from history. Within the Roman Empire, Christians were generally loyal to the Pope in Rome. Beyond the Empire, Celtic Christianity in Ireland retained loyalty to the Pope and evangelized Britain and central Europe, Nestorian Christianity in Persia evangelized India and China, and Coptic Christianity in Egypt evangelized Ethiopia. The first “heresy” (as Hilaire Belloc called it) to endure was Islam. It adopted the main tenant of the Arian heresy: Jesus Christ is not the Son of God.
The founder of Islam, Mohammad, was born in 570. In less than a century, Christendom had been fractured, Islam conquering all Christian lands from Spain, across North Africa, the Middle East, and Persia, even to India. People converted to Islam, often but not always, by force of arms. Corruption within Christendom was rampant, especially usury, which was banished under Islam, and Islam provided direct access to God without intermediaries from priest to pope who dispense Sacraments necessary for Salvation. It all seemed very liberating. At first. Then came the oppression of those who didn’t submit.
A second 500 years pass. Then, in 1054, the Great Schism separated Orthodox Christianity from the Roman Catholic Church. Two century earlier, Russia had converted to Christianity and, over the following centuries, extended Orthodox Christianity across Eurasia to the Pacific Ocean and even into Alaska. Roman Christianity tried to recover the Holy Land from Islam during the Great Crusades, beginning in 1095 and ending in 1270. A massacre of Orthodox Christians in 1204 in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade cemented the Great Schism.
Another 500 years pass. In Orthodox Christianity outside Russia, the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and within a century were at the gates of Vienna, keeping Christians in the Balkans in thralldom to Islam until late in the 19th Century. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. Evangelizing Native Americas became the new crusade in Catholic Christianity. Priests and Spanish conquistadores formed an uneasy alliance. Then in 1517 Martin Luther launched what has been called the Protestant Reformation. Protestantism adopted a central tenant of Islam: direct access to God. In its extreme form, no hierarchy was needed. Baptism was the only Sacrament necessary for Salvation and any Christian could baptize. It split northern Europe from the Roman Catholic Church, and established various Protestant national churches. Nationalism also infected the Catholic Church. Missionaries from these countries went wherever Europeans settled. Christendom, even fragmented, was transported to the Third World by Christian missionaries sent from European countries and their colonies during the heyday of Western Imperialism driven by Nationalism, a Christian heresy dating from the Protestant Reformation. As the Germans said, “Gott mit uns!” European missionaries were generally assisted by nation states with a state religion. At the dawn of the 20th Century, European Imperialism had brought virtually the whole world under the domination of Christian nations. Islam was conquered and nearly all lands of the old Roman Empire were once again in Christian hands.
Now another 500 years have passed. Nationalism within Christendom led to two world wars twenty years apart in the 20th Century when Christians killed Christians by the tens of millions. The 20th Century began with Muslim Turks exterminating Armenian Christians during World War I in the first state-planned genocide. The Christian nations did nothing and resumed killing Christians through World War II. Then the deluge. The captive world revolted. Today resurgent Islam is engaged in murdering or banishing every Christian in lands it controls across the vast Islamic realm, with no push-back from Christian nations. Atheistic dictators had banished a Christian witness from the public square in most European countries. In the Americas there is an atheistic push to make professing Jesus Christ a Hate Crime punished by fines, imprisonment, and ultimately, death. The late Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago said a few years ago, “I expect to die in my bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.” This trend is now far advanced in our northern neighbor, Canada. It had already been implemented in our southern neighbor, Mexico, in the 20th Century during the Communist-Masonic Calles dictatorship of the 1920s. Today, Christendom is fractured into over 33,000 denominations. Many agreeing with Islam on a key belief: Jesus Christ was only a man. Only a tiny fraction of Christians attend church services in the First World.
It began when Charles Darwin, son of an Anglican prelate, convinced the intelligentsia (and they didn’t need much convincing) that human beings came from worms and our only destiny is to become worm shit. We were not created by the Creator of the Universe with His goal being spending eternity with us in Heaven through the saving graces of Jesus Christ. In less than a century, the Darwinian heresy included rejecting the very existence of God. The Universe wasn’t created and God’s “moral laws” (the Ten Commandments and the Eight–or Nine–Beatitudes) were the work of mere men and should be replaced by a “survival of the fittest” ideology that justified those with power grabbing everything they can in the few remaining years of life they have. They stopped having children (Why spend the time, money, and effort producing worm shit?), and used their power to stop Third World women from having children. Why? So they wouldn’t lose their power merely by being out-bred. Specifically targeted were China, India, and Africa. Africans have been the toughest in resisting this war against women who bear the next generation of mankind. Communist China, being atheistic, was the easiest to seduce.
Atheistic Communism began in Russia, with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It put the Russian Orthodox Church under the heel of the atheistic Communist Party, with death or Siberian exile of Orthodox priests who resisted. With his power consolidated in the USSR, Stalin extended the Revolution worldwide, infiltrating the democracies of Western Europe and Latin America. In Spain, Soviet communism caused the Spanish Civil War. It caused great civil unrest in Germany, leading to World War II and the Darwin-inspired Holocaust, the second state-planned genocide of the 20th Century. After World War II, Stalin took over Eastern Europe and targeted Africa. Popular historic Christian monarchies in Britain, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia prevented Stalinist dictatorships from taking hold.
Disciples of French Jesuit Pierre Tielhard de Chardin believed Darwinian biological evolution now made “social Darwinism” possible, with Jesus Christ as the prototype for an “Omega Point” of human evolution attainable by Liberation Theology that fueled Leninist-Stalinist revolutions worldwide. Soviet atheists used their Jesuit lackeys to promote the Communist State as the only legitimate “voice of the people”. It was a “voice” molded by Soviet propaganda and a Jesuitical “preferential option for the poor” that in fact meant execution or imprisonment of anyone who voiced objections. We are all children of our cultures and social positions. Elites strive to impose their “enlightened” views by force.
As an Argentine bishop, Pope Francis made a sustained effort to personally live and experience how the “oppressed” live. So did many other Jesuits, but their “preferential option for the poor” was expressed as Liberation Theology now seen in full caustic bloom in Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba, which actively persecutes the Church, as did Daniel Ortega’s Communist dictatorship in Nicaragua, and keeps the Cuban people in worse poverty than under the capitalist Batista regime Castro overthrew. Latin Americans saw that, and for the most part avoided embracing it. Mexicans experienced their own brutal Communist-Masonic dictatorship under Calles, so they knew better.
Here in America, Catholic bishops replaced their much-ballyhooed “preferential option for the poor” with an actual preferential option for trial lawyers who would keep them out of prison for routinely moving homosexual predatory priests from parish to parish so they always had fresh altar boys to sodomize. Then they handed faithful Catholics the bills from their lawyers and the two-billion-dollar-and-counting “settlements” these lawyers made with the victims, their families, and their lawyers.
In the Soviet Bloc of Europe, Stalin tried to subvert the Catholic Church in Poland with propaganda saying it was infested with predatory homosexuals. Pope John Paul II knew this, so he didn’t react quickly until he discovered the Kremlin had actually succeeded in planting these homosexuals in the American Catholic priesthood, even to the point of taking over seminaries and including Cardinal Archbishops. This, combined with the practice by American bishops of giving Our Lord in Holy Communion to militantly pro-abortion “Catholic” politicians, has split the Catholic Church right down the middle. By eagerly embracing no-fault divorce, abortion, and sodomy, most “mainline” Protestant churches (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Episcopalians) have gone from half the U.S. population in 1958 to 14 percent today. The Southern Baptist Convention and Evangelical mega-churches, after a flirtation with Darwin, are generally holding firm. So far. The great worldwide missionary among Evangelical Christians has been Billy Graham, his Crusade for Christ now being continued by his son Franklin.
The American Catholic Church is historically allied with the Democrat Party, which has now become atheistic and crypto-communist, embracing divorce, abortion, and sodomy that will eventually destroy marriage and the family. The same is true of the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, with much money and few voters (“Big hat, no cattle,” we would say out West). The outcome of promoting abortion by giving Holy Communion to these “Catholic” politicians in both parties, and promoting sodomy in the priesthood, has been a loss of belief in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, first among bishops. This doctrine is so central to Catholicism that, once it is abandoned, Catholics, beginning with bishops and priests, not only stop being Catholics, they stop being Christians. So the primary evangelical duty of bishops, given to them by Jesus Christ as the Great Commission, has been abandoned. Why preach a Gospel you no longer believe?
As a result, half of Catholics left the Church, becoming either un-churched or members of non-denominational evangelical churches that preach the Gospel (both here and in Latin America). Most who remain doubt the Real Presence but retain historical social and ethnic ties. They avoid “mainline” Protestant churches that were historically anti-Catholic, have now embraced the Darwinian heresy, and are spiritually dead as a result. These losses reduced Catholics in America from what would be over half the American population today to 25 percent, now approaching 20 percent. Those who still believe in the Real Presence, and who are therefore true Catholics, are probably 10 percent or less. With these losses, combined with even greater losses in “mainline” Protestant denominations, it is no wonder why Liberal (“Anything goes!”) Progressive (“Ban the Bible!!”) Darwinists (“Survival of the fittest: Us!!!”) now control all the levers of wealth, power, and influence in American society, and now think the time has arrived for a total takeover that will “fundamentally transform America” in the words of their biracial Occidental-Columbia-Harvard-indoctrinated toady occupying the White House who has a deep-seated hatred of America and of Christianity that becomes more obvious with each passing day.
Today, it is not just a revolt against Christianity, as with Islam, or fractures within Christendom, as with the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation. It is a revolt against God. It has been called “Nihilism”, “Modernism”, “Americanism”, “The Dictatorship of Relativism”, and other names, but it is the latest attempt of Lucifer-become-Satan to overthrow Jesus Christ, attempts that have had remarkable success every 500 years.
Satan’s attack in all these attempts has been directed at exploiting human pride, in imitation of the angelic pride that triggered the fall of him and his angels-become-demons. His trick is to put the human intellect in thralldom to the human will, out of human pride. His seduction works best among the most prideful: the intelligentsia who control academia, science, the media, entertainment, business, government, and all too many Christian churches. The intelligentsia actually embraces becoming worm shit, and rejects the promise of Jesus Christ: to spend eternity with the Creator God who loves them infinitely more than they can possibly imagine. Only a fool would exchange such a birthright for that pottage. But we were told long ago, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’.” True then. True now. Ultimately, this is a war on God. We are witnessing the prophesy of Gamaliel, who told the Sanhedrin to not persecute Christians. If Jesus Christ was only a man, Christians will vanish. If He is who He said He is, they will be fighting God.
With the fall of Soviet Communism in 1979, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a slow revival. Liberation Theology has lost its Soviet financial patron in Latin America, and is losing its Communistic allure. Evangelical Christianity is rapidly filling the void.
Now we have a Jesuit Pope. Jesuits have been accused, rightly or not, of being slippery. Pope Francis admonishes an Italian woman for having too many children, saying she is “breeding like a rabbit”. Then he extols the blessings many children give to a family. Regarding homosexuality he says, “Who am I to judge?” Then he tells us homosexual marriages will destroy the family. His response to the vigorous Catholic Orthodoxy of Cardinal Burke as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has been to banish him to Malta, while expressing great admiration for Cardinal Kasper, who openly lobbies for admitting to Holy Communion divorced-and-remarried Catholics and homosexuals-practicing-sodomy, thereby gutting the Catholic Sacraments of Matrimony and the Eucharist. Then Pope Francis turns around and says these Sacraments must be vigorously defended. Where does the “Jesuit” end and the Vicar of Christ begin?
My personal hope is Pope Francis proves to be a very foxy Jesuit who says and does these things to smoke out the enemies of Jesus Christ within the Church. With enough “encouragement” they will drop their feigned loyalty to Christ and declare their true allegiance. Francis was not elected by the College of Cardinals. That is an illusion, like the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist appearing to us as bread and wine. Francis was chosen by the Holy Spirit, as Jesus Christ promised. My hope is to trust Him. Hope is a theological virtue. We cannot earn it. Hope is a gift from God.
Each of the earlier 500-year crises in Christendom has resulted in “permanent” losses of faith in Jesus Christ. The Islamic heresy gave us people without belief in Christ as the Son of God. The Great Schism in Eastern Europe abandoned loyalty to His Vicar on Earth. It ushered in centuries of thralldom to Islam. The Protestant Revolt gave birth to nationalism as a religion that led to two fratricidal wars worldwide and left Western Europe without Hope. The Darwinian heresy running rampant throughout Europe today aspires to make this loss of Hope permanent by promoting disbelief in God. Believing their only destiny is to become worm shit is not enough to sustain the ancient people who populate Europe today. Darwinism will make them dim memories, like the idol-worshipping tribes in Canaan and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel who offered their children to Baal and Moloch as human sacrifices, in exchange for material wealth. Rampant abortion, a consequence of Darwinian atheism, makes the same sacrifice for the same reason with the same result.
When bearing and raising children are no longer seen as the greatest joys of living, as providing Hope for eternal union with our Creator God who died to get us into Heaven with Him, and leaves only worm shit as our destiny, la dolce vita becomes the only reason for living. Already the Muslim Arab and Turk flood into Europe, replacing the Briton, Gaul, Teuton, and Slav, this time not by conquest, but merely by bearing children. By the end of this century, Islam will have replaced Christianity in Europe, just as it has in most of the Mediterranean world. We have the promise of the Mother of God to the children at Fatima that Portugal and Russia will remain as Christian countries. That gives us Hope for the rest of Europe as well. The future of mankind is now clear as the handwriting on the wall in ancient Babylon: extinction of all those who embrace the Darwinian heresy.
Many will insist Darwinism is rooted in science, not in religion. Well, Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, told us the test of whether some proposition belongs to science is to ask, “Can it be falsified?” By that he meant is it subject to experimental tests that determine whether it is true or false? Atheistic Darwinian evolution holds we are a result of random environmental changes acting on random genetic mutations (Darwin proposed only natural selection; he knew nothing of mutations, a biological discovery in a branch of science founded by Gregor Mendel, a Catholic monk). The key word is “random”. It leaves no space for God in the natural environment, including evolution of mankind from worms. Darwinism teaches the human brain is a product of random events in nature, with self-conscious intellect, will, and empathy having a purely biological origin, so when the human body (and brain) dies, it is eaten by worms and excreted as worm shit. It’s humanity ceases to exist. Darwinism attempts to dodge Popper’s test by ignoring scientific experiments that demonstrate its falsity. But there is one set of experiments it can’t ignore. Here it is.
The Research News section of Science magazine, the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on pages 1232-1233 of the 12 December 1980 issue (which can be accessed Online), carried the headline, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” It showcased a student at Sheffield University in England “who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.” A brain scan showed his cerebrum, where all “human” attributes reside according to Darwinian theory, was only a millimeter thick and plastered against the inside of his skull by cerebrospinal fluid. Darwinian theory points to primitive “humanoid” skulls with brainpans that get larger over time and have the imprint of brain convolutions on the inside. Convolutions increase the area of the cerebrum and are cited as “proof” of evolution toward the modern human brain. The Sheffield student had a cerebrum of almost undetectable volume and no convolutions.
So why can’t the definitively “human” characteristics of self-conscious intellect, will, and empathy also reside in brains occupying any of those very old “primitive” humanoid skulls? Why do these characteristics have to exist in a human brain at all? Why can’t they exist in the human soul, which uses the human brain to communicate these qualities to other human beings? That’s what Christianity teaches. We are created in the image and likeness of God, a pure spirit with no brain. The Sheffield student is not alone. Physicians have reported many such people over many years. In common parlance they are called “waterheads” and each one of them is a scientific “experiment” that falsifies Darwinism and moves it from the domain of science to the realm of religion, based on an atheistic faith that is a heretical departure from traditional Christianity.
The future of humanity may fall by default to China, where Christianity is displacing atheistic Communism and its deadly war on children, and to Africa, where Christianity is displacing paganism south of the Sahara, and is confronting Islam for control of what had been the Dark Continent. Perhaps even India will exchange its millennia of idol-worship for Faith in Jesus Christ, another theological virtue. Christian Faith was planted in India by one of His twelve apostles, “doubting” Thomas. We can Hope the seed of Faith ripens and bears much fruit in India. Then we can Hope Christian missionaries from China, India, and Africa return the Faith to Europe, and even bring it to Islam. We can even Hope with Saint Paul the Jewish people will accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. That would produce the greatest missionaries the world has ever seen.
404 North Sixth Street, Fort Pierre, South Dakota 57532, 12 June 2015.
Yishai Schlissel and the Israeli Sodomites Tom Condit at Women Betrayed Rally in Cincinnati, 28 July, 2015 at Planned Parenthood
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