Vortex: A Realistic Look at the Present

I think it’s a good time to really pay attention to the Vortex – starting with last Friday’s episode. I’m told that this week’s episodes reflect some important information from top sources in Rome. Things are bad, but that can be a good thing.

Last Friday’s episode (6/21/13) was entitled “The Whole Rotten Mess”. The script is available here; I’ll summarize with excerpts.

Michael Voris was reporting from the Acton Institute conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended by close to 1000 people who “gathered to discuss the affairs of the world from a Christian perspective”. Voris notes that

…when a society cuts itself off from God and changes course on close to two thousand years of understanding of man and his inter-relationships that bad things follow. First principles – their importance cannot be overstated.  If you get it wrong in the beginning, the whole project is doomed to failure; sooner or later, the whole thing will come crashing down.

This is the prospect for the so-called western democracies, both in the US and Europe.  The clock has already run out.  The West is merely running on fumes right now. It IS taking some time for it to all to burn out because it was so big to begin with but we are writing checks our morality can no longer cash.

There are some brave noble souls fighting the good fight, hoping against hope that the current situation can be salvaged, but it cannot.

Gee, thanks, Mike. Always the bluebird of happiness, eh?!  Yes, I know, it’s not a pretty picture, but the thing is, this is reality. For too long, we have been going along, whistling in the dark, telling ourselves that things will get better after the next election, that we’ll elect more pro-life politicians, that people will see the light as Planned Parenthood and the Gosnells of the world are exposed.

It’s a nice thought, but as Voris says:

It is unreasonable and naïve to conclude that the West is all of a sudden going to become pro-life, anti-same-sex marriage, anti-contraception... in short, anti-selfish… after multiple generations have been fed a non-stop diet of self-satisfaction as the highest ideal. Read it: AIN’T. GONNA. HAPPEN.

Voris has spoken before about the “third rail” issue of contraception. Until the pro-life movement as a whole begins to see that contraception is at the heart of the abortion problem, things will not change. And the population at large is not likely to come to an understanding of the grave moral dangers and the demographic side effects of contraception any time soon. The information is out there, and it’s getting some press, but people are, as Voris notes, selfish. There has been little catechesis even (especially?) in the Church about the salvific value of suffering, about the necessity of sacrifice. Instead, modernist and personalist philosophies have infiltrated Church teaching and turned our minds toward the individual’s perception of his own private experience – and that has made “forming my own conscience” the watchword.

And just like the culture, says Voris

The Catholic Church in the West – the Establishment – no longer operates with the same set of first principles that She once did.  Her entire self-understanding, Her own self-conception, has been jettisoned and been replaced by an entirely new and rotten sense – rotten to the proverbial core.

Leaders have traded away the notion of truth and goodness and beauty in exchange for accommodation, and indifferentism and political correctness. Truth Beauty and Goodness inspire zeal and apostolic fervor. There is almost none of that left because those core constituents; those first principles are gone.

What is left is Church within a Church – a small remnant of those who still cling tenaciously to those first principles and ALL that they necessarily admit of… ALL of it…

…If you want to know about the condition of the Church, all you have to do is look at the culture. When the culture is in calamitous straits which it is, it means the Church has failed to convert the culture.

When the Church is in such a calamitous state, it means the culture has converted the Church.  This reality simply cannot continue.  A large portion of the Church will either repent, or it will be pruned away. And the culture, deprived by Church leaders of the truth of Christ, will be the instrument used for the pruning.

That can’t be denied, can it? The culture – which has forsaken Christian values, let alone Catholic ones – is currently the set of pruning shears that will reduce the Church – the true Church – to a remnant. The HHS contraception mandate will separate those who will cling to the faith from those who will throw in the towel. The homosexual agenda is another pruning point. How long before Catholic churches are required to allow “gay weddings” to take place in their very sanctuaries? Etc.

I admit that this Vortex episode made me wonder about myself a little. I was so pleased to have Voris say there's no hope for the West, and no hope for the "establishment" Church! I often think about the parallels between where society is going (has gone) and where the Church is going (has gone).

Am I just a closet pessimist and harbinger of doom? Is that I liked hearing the bad news? No, not really; I actually am the eternal optimist, once you get to know me!

But what I like is hearing the truth. And I have found that more and more I'm not paying that much attention to the pro-life "victories", because they are largely meaningless. Blogger Tantamergo read my mind when he asked in a recent post why people are so excited about the House passing that 20-week abortion ban. Big deal! The Senate won't pass it, and Obama would veto it anyway! People want to kill babies, and the tide has turned to such an extent that they are going to kill babies. Again, there will be no real victory for the pro-life movement until the movement itself as a whole sees the evil of contraception. Even then, it's probably too late now. I think we have to hit bottom for real before we can rebuild.

This note of “Doom and Gloom” continued on Monday’s (6/24/13) Vortex (script here):


Here’s the bottom line, though: seeing it all as “doom and gloom” is a worldly perspective.  As MV says:

There is a lot – a hell of a lot… emphasis on Hell – wrong in the world today. So much so that it’s easy to look around and despair. And that despair is understandable if we view things from a strictly earthly perspective. In fact, it is the NATURAL response to the current situation of so much madness in the world AND in the Church.

But if we take a supernatural perspective, we see that

Great saints are forged in these circumstances. The chance given us by Heaven to rise to the occasion and lay hold to the kingdom prepared for us from the foundations of the world.

We are called and baptized to battle evil – in ourselves as well as the culture – and by doing battle, merit Heaven. Heaven is not the gift of grace so much as the opportunity to lay claim to it is. No one earns heaven strictly speaking; no one has a claim on God by their natural right. But He Himself has bound Himself to us under oath to give us out heavenly inheritance according to our deeds, and in His infinite inscrutable ways, He has allowed the current crisis to unfold whereby we can seize our inheritance.

So we must fight. We must fight until we die. We must die fighting.

If that little excerpt doesn’t inspire you, be sure to watch the whole Vortex (I recommend it regardless!).

To be continued…