Old hatreds of the Church alive and well in Paris

08-11-2024Weekly ReflectionFr. Leonard F. Villa

We don't live in a carefree society. Our lives are really part of a merciless struggle against infernal powers, all the more dangerous because they are invisible and all the more powerful because they effectively influence a certain number of people. The Word of God teaches us this through the mouth of Saint Paul: "We do not have to fight (only) against flesh and blood, but against the rulers of this dark world, against the evil spirits that are in the air" (Eph. 6:12).

NOTE: One of the signs of the demonic is “Christ’s Name attacked with conscious rebellious hatred.” Pope Paul VI

Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the former head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, commented on the recent obscene, blasphemous antics, mocking the Last Supper with themes of Satanic hatred, which degraded the opening of the Olympics in Paris. Here’s what he said:

The completely dehumanized poses with which LGBT ideologists mocked not only Jesus' Last Supper but also their own human dignity at the inauguration ceremony of the Olympic Games are clearly linked to the Jabobin campaign to de-Christianize France. At the height of this anti-church frenzy, on November 10, 1793, the French revolutionaries had a naked woman enter the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as the goddess of reason and had her demonstrate sexual perversions on the altar. Blasphemous obscenities against religion are inseparably linked to physical and psychological violence against Christian believers. Because the "cult of reason and freedom" is inseparably linked to the Great Terror, to which hundreds of thousands and millions of innocent people fell victim in the totalitarian atheist system - starting with the Jacobins, the masters of the gulliotine, through the fascists and communists, up to the present day, in which Christians are the most persecuted religious community in the world. (NOTE: The Jacobins were the most radical and ruthless of the political groups formed in the wake of the French Revolution, and in association with Robespierre they instituted the Terror of 1793-4.)

The woke-ideology in the West has explicitly atheistic roots. It is thoroughly marked by hatred of Jesus Christ and is consumed by the most vicious agitation against the Catholic Church. It expresses itself in the discrimination of Christians in violent words and actions, up to and including judicial crimes against humanity, for example when parents' own children are taken away from them by court order if they do not allow their children's genitals to be mutilated - all under the euphemism of "self-determination of one's own gender". The French state authorities justify their allowing these anti-Christian and inhumane productions with the ideology of secularism, which by no means is the religious neutrality of the state, it is just a code name for the brutal violation of the human right to freedom of religion and conscience. People rave about the inclusion of "woke" people in a country where Catholics have been systematically excluded from public life and viciously discriminated against for 200 years. They do not realize that they have allowed the honor of France, which as a country and culture owes everything to Christianity, to be dragged through the mud and that they themselves have contributed to it in a fit of mental derangement.

Contempt for religion and conscience inevitably leads to psychological terror and violence. These Olympic authorities should realize this when looking at Francisco Goya's painting from 1797. (See above) It is entitled: "The sleep of reason gives birth to monsters." In mythology, Saturn or Kronos is the offspring of the earth gods Uranus and Gaia, the icon of the new climate religion and states in plain language that everything is overtaken and destroyed by time, including neo-pagan ideologies. The Apostle Paul already described the suicidal consequences that result from contempt for reason open to God when God's eternal power and divinity are denied.

"For this reason God gave them over to impurity through the passions of their hearts, so that they dishonored their bodies by their own actions." (Rom 1:24). The mockery of the Lord's Supper by spiritually uprooted and psychologically disturbed actors, their instigators and financiers, was an act of spiritual terrorism that backfired on its authors. "The revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children and finally gives birth to despotism with all its evils," were the last words of Pierre Verniaud, the leader of the Girondists on the scaffold. And the Jacobins, who are taking the anti-Christian cultural revolution to its extreme, are soon to follow. We are less concerned with these historical-philosophical considerations than with the groundbreaking word of God, which surpasses all human wisdom and gives even the misguided hope that they can escape the prison of their perversion and stupidity: "For God says, 'I have no pleasure in the death of a sinner, but that he should turn from his way and live'" (Ez 33:11).

NOTE: (Kronos/Saturn, a god in ancient Greek mythology, regularly devoured his own children. The Girondists were a political group during the French Revolution that resisted the course of the Revolution using terror and wholesale executions as its method under the Jacobins.) (END)

Another historical outbreak of the pathology of the French Revolution was the terror of the Paris Commune in 1871. A revolutionary party took possession of the city after the siege of Paris by the Prussians began. In the last days of March 1871, they began to arrest priests and religious to whom personal character or official position gave a certain prominence. No reason was given for these arbitrary measures, except the hatred with which the leaders of the Commune regarded the Catholic Church and her ministers. On Holy Thursday 6 April 1871, Henri Planchat was the first to be imprisoned. Many other faithful Catholics followed. For some, it was the beginning of a real ordeal. One of the revolutionaries' hostages, Archbishop Darboy, summed up the situation for one of his companions in these words: "They don't want to kill us because I'm Archbishop Darboy and you're Monsignor So-and-so, but because I'm the Archbishop of Paris and you're one of my priests". Pope Francis acknowledged that, in the case of at least five of them, the reason for their deaths was their profession of faith in Christ and in the truth of the Catholic Church.

A prominent commentator on Russian nihilism is Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel called The Demons. An article in the New Criterion described the novel this way: …a band of young nihilists and socialists unleashes murder, riot, and arson in a provincial Russian town. Despite their ugly pranks, scandalous libertinism, and incendiary radicalism, they are until the apocalyptic denouement indulged and flattered by their elders: liberal elites who suppose that proximity to the “new ideas” will get them noticed in the highest social circles of progressivist Petersburg. This suicidal clownishness is characteristic of late modernity since the French Revolution, an epoch in which convulsions of ideological insanity have periodically torn apart physical and political bodies across the globe. The United States has long avoided such fits, but it seems our hour has come round at last. At its sesquicentennial, Dostoevsky’s novel is as fresh and urgent as it was in 1871. The essay goes on to note: “No one understands late-modern liberal oligarchs and their nihilistic children better than Dostoevsky.” A modern Dostoevsky was Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his writings and novels where he describes the horror of Soviet communism. Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre was built in reparation for the crimes of the Paris Commune! (emphasis added)