Times are tough. Our enemies are relentless. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this darkness, against the spirits wickedness in the high places (Ep. 6-12).

I hate to say it, but emergency contraception has been dispensed in Catholic hospitals for years. The 1995 Peoria protocol was instituted to actually tighten up the reins. The horse is in Mexico by now, and we are just noticing that the barn is empty.

Tomorrow is the Feast of St. Michael. We will be celebrating a Mass from the Missal of John XXIII, Missa Cantata at 7:00 pm in Griswold. Who is like God? No one. Even so, the most God-like creature ever was told to expect miracles, because no word shall be impossible with God (Luke 1:37). Oremus.

It is time to invoke the Holy Angels and to fast. That would be a manly thing to do.

Robert Hugh Benson (d. 1914) was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and brother to E. F. Benson the novelist and author of many great ghost stories. Robert Hugh converted to Catholicism and was ordained a priest. In his own right became an eminent literary man of the Catholic persuasion.

One of his best known works is Lord of the World. It is a story about what would happen if the principles of secularism were to gain the upper hand over religion, specifically over the Roman Catholic Church. Benson, writing in 1908, shows himself a prophet.

On February 8, 1992, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke at the Catholic University of Milan. There he recalled Robert Hugh Benson’s little masterpiece in the context of discussing current predicaments. He said it described “a similar unified civilization and its power to destroy the spirit. The anti-Christ is represented as the great carrier of peace in a similar new world order.” So here we are.

In the book, one of the secularists who has been completely indoctrinated by the Anti-Christ, Felsenburgh, ruminates on the “wickedness” of Catholic belief and its effect on the public order:

But the very essence of the Catholic Religion was treason to the very idea of man. Christians directed their homage to a supposed supernatural Being who was not only–so they claimed–outside of the world but positively transcended it. Christians, then–leaving aside the mad fable of the Incarnation, which might very well be suffered to die of its own folly–deliberately severed themselves from that Body of which by human generation they had been made members. They were as mortified limbs yielding themselves to the domination of an outside force other than that which was their only life, and by that very act imperilled the entire Body. This madness, then, was the one crime which still deserved the name. Murder, theft, rape, even anarchy itself, were as trifling faults compared to this monstrous sin, for while these injured indeed the Body they did not strike at its heart–individuals suffered; but the very Life was not struck at. But in Christianity there was a poison actually deadly. Every cell that became infected with it was infected in that very fibre that bound it to the spring of life. This, and this alone, was the supreme crime of High Treason against man–and nothing but completed removal from the world could be an adequate remedy.

We are made as the refuse of this world, the offscouring of all, even until now (1 Corinthians 4:13). So what else is new. I am serious about the fasting. Think about it.