We are in the throes of it now! I never thought we would see the results of Pope Leo XIII’s vision* of the Great Apostasy come into tangible reality on so many levels so soon. Neither was I expecting our beloved Holy Father, Pope Francis, to turn his back on his own compassionate brilliance in favour of a secularist lie that trades authentic compassion – the harmonious co-existance of the human family with the animal kingdom – for worldly respectibility as promoted through the prioritization and alienation of the human family away from the God-centered understanding and appreciation of a holy and healthy relationship both with humanity and the animal kingdom.

The secularist model advocated by the fallicious idea that ‘having pets instead of children diminishes us’ throws the central message of a family life lived in harmony with a compassionate Gospel that appreciates the sacredness of all created life, effectively in the bin and instead opts for viewing family life in a not too dissimilar fashion to the way that the people of the world elevate progress, status and success above the humble sentience and compassionate sensitivity inherent in authentically loving relationships. It was also prophetically stated through some of the messages received by the three children in Fatima that Satan’s final battle would center around his demise of the family. And we are seeing this unfold in all so many unexpected ways. And we are to rightly interpret this to mean that devil intends to try and tear assunder not only the nucleus of sancrosanct and procreative family life but also the divinely decreed order of natural law and respect within the “greater human family alongside the entire family of creation” and all the God-given positivity of relationship that exists between them.

Not only has this terrible fanatical plot of the Evil One been gripping our world through the various wars and calamities which have rendedered the possibility of living a normal family life for many a great impossibility but these calamities had brought about as part and parcel of their aftereffects, as Pope Benedict XVI once declared, the completely warped and deformed social reality of the sexual revolution, embraced by millions as the so-called “signature of freedom”. In reality this ‘revolution’ was nothing short of a horrendously dark descent into the dungeons of an existence nulla libertas, a moral and social terrain of no freedom and concommitant spiritual imperilment which the various types of sexual levity and promiscuity that accompanied it brought to bear so heavily on this planet and which is furthermore why secularization has also concurrently infested the Church in a manner and proportion unseen or unheard of before. All the while, alongside these counterintuitive calamities of the post-war era, we also had the positive emergence of a spirit of ethical contemplation and reflexivity, which in some ways unlike anything prior, was seen and experienced as never before, and began to infuse the halls of learning, academia, scholarship and public relations thereby filtering through these into the hearts and minds of wider society to give it a more just and morally equitable vision of how people ought to relate to each other and treat the wider creation.

Much of this positivity was a result of hard lessons learnt from the tragic consequences of two major world wars and not to mention the miscellaneous disfigurements of human dignity that marked the various epochs of social transitioning which led up to the 20th century’s war era. No doubt the Holy Spirit was hard at work to get our collective attention through all of this and as a result we do have Him to thank for the progress in moral philosophy we have made as a human family in light of those hard lessons learnt for it was Him who turned our attention to the plight of the unrested and unrewarded labourer during the outset and heyday of the Industrial Revolution. It was Him who got our attention regarding the need to recognize the right of women to be able to pursue a dignified life free from the drudgery of being tied in unholy bondage to an existance that reflected not the liberating message of redemption and restoration which God wants all humankind to actively embrace and work for but the bogged aridity of fallen nature and the banal relationship of fettered ties to manhood that womanhood had plunged into after the Fall in Eden. It was also the work of the same Holy Spirit that saw the persistent and active abolition of the Atlantic slave trade alongside a growing distrust of the ‘moral defence’ of the lethal weponry and ideological minefields that led to the pursuit of such accursed socioeconomic relationships which endorsed and promulgated slavery alongside trivial militaristic exploits that aroused henious global conflicts. This kind of societal evolutionary progress is inclusive of developing a greater sensitivity to what St Pope John Paul II often referred to as that authentic expression of human solidarity which promotes an ethical responsibility to cultivate a civilization of love thereby countering the oppositional culture of death. Only the Holy Spirit brings about such changes by enacting upon the collective human consciousness and stirring up within hearts the need for certain types of transformations which result in more favourable relational conditions and experiential opportunities for a greater number of people and the wider creation, and this in effect helps create an awareness of the difference between selfishness and generosity of heart and why it matters. On the side of generosity we have all kinds of charitable initiatives and an innumerable variety of charisms including that of campaigning for the fostering of educated awareness, pragmatic and legislative improvements concerning animal welfare primarily due to the original duty of care we humans have been given by God to be responsively and responsibly kind hearted in our relationships with other species.

Ideally, our own human way of relating to life’s purpose ought to be three-fold as it should reflect the Trinitarian nature of God. We owe first our love and praise to God for creating us and for giving us His Son in His selfless act of redeeming us from the quagmire of the fallen part of our nature. Therefore, God’s purpose ought to first and foremost be the centrepoint of our lives. Secondly we have a duty of care to look after our world, the creation as revealed to us in species other than our own. After God created Adam, he dispositioned him to look after everything He had made. Then came Eve, and God exhorted them to follow suit with the rest of creation in going forth to multiply. This meant too that they were to bask to some degree in the creative brilliance of their own humanity but not forgetting their Divinely appointed destiny as both Adam & Eve were set with the task of serving, being caring stewards of all that God had made on earth which was essentially the Garden of Eden for they were assigned specifically to this location as it was the primordial progeny of the Creation, the central pillar or axis if you like, around which all else harmoniously took its course. So humanity’s relationship was meant to be reflective of that of the Holy Trinity and was to bear some similarity to that of the heavenly hosts in their three-fold relationship to their Maker, themselves and the creation.

If we take the example of the good angels, those who remained loyal to God and didn’t choose to defect to the haughty rebellion, their life’s charism is Trinitarian in that they have a balanced way of relating three-fold. They are in an eternally (ineffible – to our human consciousness) sublimity of praise & worship due to God whilst at the same time being in harmony with their own God-given identity whilst at one and the same time they are faithful in their God-given mission of responsibility in charitably helping to look after the rest of creation which is basically comprised of us humans, the animal kingdom, plant life, elements, and the other parts of the earth and cosmos. Unlike the fallen angels, God’s faithful messengers take seriously and with the full force of unbridled generosity the caring nature of their stewardship role in relation to us and the other aspects of the created order even though it is “denser” or “lower” than the heavenlies as such. For these celestial stewards consider rendering such a humble service to us and the rest of creation as pure joy and as all part and parcel of their duty to render service, praise, worship, honour & all glory to God. The fallen ones on the other hand are so puffed up about their own celestial status that they consider doing anything for beings that are “denser” or “lower” than them by nature to be completely beneath them and therefore unthinkable hence the Satanic catch-cry hurtled towards God by Lucifer “I will not serve”. That’s why the angels who fell and consequently became demons do not have any love for us or the rest of creation for they disrobed themselves of the Supremacy of Love upon choosing to follow Lucifer instead of God. Hence their unbridled hatred and disdain for anything humble or love-centered as they are only willing to defend and contemplate their own ugly egos. This stain of the fallen angels had rubbed off onto humanity with the onset of the Original Sin of our first parents which is why we humans in our fallen state have become so expert at looking after our own interests at the expense of the Universal Interest of God in the collective regeneration of cosmological wellbeing and order according to the laws set in motion by the Divine Plan and this includes the wellbeing of other species beside ourselves. Because of humanity having listened to the lies of the serpent through the disobedience to God done by Adam and Eve, our image, which was once perfectly positioned to reflect the image & likeness of our Maker, has taken on a portion of the personality traits that the fallen angels exhibit and the tendency towards an unhealthy preoccupation with one’s own species is paramount to such personality trait disfigurement. This is the emergence of the great darkness that has been prophesied to befall the earth and to also deceive many in the Church, even the elect, – the diabolical proliferation of the supremacy of mankind above all else, even God & His Divine Will.

When one thinks of the elect within the Church, one cannot help but think of the Pontifical Rite of Election. My heart is heavy with an ineffible sadness for how someone I so greatly admired as a champion of respect for all life, that is, the sacredness of all the life which God so lovingly fashioned particularly in view of the 2015 encyclical Laudato Si has now turned about-face. How the Holy Father could callously desert the compassionate integrity of his own Christ-centered heart so keenly nurtured over the years since his election to the pontificate is truly beyond my comprehension! I know that Pope Francis also many times over asked everyone to pray for him for he admitted that he is a sinner in need of prayerful support and petition. But I never thought that side of his self-declared weakness would ever be brought to the fore of his public ministry so prolifically and so heartwrenchingly. I cannot stress enough how earnestly and needfully we all do need to pray, in particular for the integrity of his leadership which is now on the brink because the devil in his guile is looking for innumerable ways to tighten his stranglehold on the Church as foretold in the horrible vision which befell Pope Leo XIII.

While, God in His almighty wisdom had instigated such a duel between Himself and His adversary much to the same cause and effect as He did in the story of Job, we need to be ever vigillant and continually seek for the gracious intercession of the Holy Spirit along with the unfailing help of the Angels & Saints in countering and demolishing the avalanches, disempowerments, assaults and retaliations of the already defeated but nonetheless seemingly indominable foe.

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Reference:
*https://ucatholic.com/blog/the-terrifying-vision-of-pope-leo-xiii/

Key Words: Pope Leo XIII, Natural Law, Human Solidarity, St Pope John Paul II, Trinitarian, The Elect, Civilization of Love vs Culture of Death