True Capitalism vs. Corporatism

As I write this, it is about 7 AM in the morning and I am sitting in the lounge of a large corporation I am doing some long-term contract work for.  I have been in the corporate world as an administrative professional for over 20 years at this point, and a part of the reason I am writing this now is due to a bit of exasperation I have been feeling about the behemoth called "Corporate America," and today is a day in which it would be opportune to talk about it.

My own experience with "Corporate America" started back when I was a couple of years out of college in 1998, and over the years I've worked for several large corporations in a number of industries, as primarily I have done what is called "temp work" during the majority of that tenure.  Being a "temp," which is a word I honestly hate to use as I am in reality a contractor, has been a revelatory experience - I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in many companies, and with that being the case I have reached a number of conclusions.  One of the most prominent conclusions I have come to is that the higher up the corporate ladder one goes, the less practical common sense people possess.  Higher echelons of management in corporations have a sort of "tunnel vision." and it is a tunnel wallpapered with dollar signs.  Their rabid pursuit within the tunnel often denies the fundamental human dignity of their designated underlings, and the more tragic reality is that those higher-ups are often forced into the tunnel by their superiors who have an even more restricted view of human dignity and less foresight and common sense than even those below them in a management capacity.  Observations like that are the primary reason why something like this needs to be addressed.

I want to first define what the term "corporatism" is, as that is the driving impetus behind much of this. According to a Wikipedia definition, corporatism is defined as "a political ideology that advocates the organization of society by corporate groups," and furthermore, it can be classified as a form of fascism due to the fact that sectors of the economy are controlled by a private organizations (corporations) in conjunction with government bureaucracy.  Another term for this in its extreme form is syndicalism.  The idea of corporatism is often confused with free-market capitalism, although they are definitely not the same.  For corporations striving toward this syndicalist view of economy, the term "monopoly" is often used, in that a sort of carnivorous and even cannibalistic insight exists which puts a corporation in a position to take over and eliminate is "competition," which often is a smaller and more "mom-and-pop" type business of some sort.  It also seeks to eliminate self-sufficiency of individuals by creating a new class of serfs, these serfs being individuals confined to cubicles in large offices where unreasonable demands and threats of disposability keep them in check, placated as well by "benefit packages."   The common "serf" is viewed by the corporate higher echelons as an expendable commodity, and thus the employee "serf" is seen merely a means to the corporate entity's end, and thus dignity of personhood is both diminished and despised.  That summarizes the "Corporate America" of today.

In the 1998 cult classic Office Space, we see how this is played out.  One reason why this movie is a cult classic is because it presents a very accurate portrayal of the general attitudes of large corporate monopolies and their management.  And, people do relate to it.  Besides paying the employee an "acceptable" wage however, what it the true benefit of monopolistic corporatism?  Very little actually, and we will now discuss why.

The driving force of much of monopolistic corporatism is greed, which is seen as a cardinal vice in traditional Catholic teaching but is worn as a badge of honor in the corporate world.   It is what John Horvat calls in his book Return to Order (York, PA:  York Press, 2013) on page 2 by the term "frenetic intemperance."  The way Horvat defines "frenetic intemperance" is this - an exaggerated trust in our technological society, a terrifying isolation of our individualism, and a self-imposed heavy burden of materialism.  The result, as Horvat further notes, is a modern economy that is out of balance, cold, impersonal, mechanical, and inflexible, and it can in time lead to socialism or fascism.  Horvat, on page 14 of the same text, gives monopolistic corporatism another name - gigantism - and notes that this mentality undermines the free market as well as attacking rights to private property, and this is all driven by an oligarchy of powerful corporate executives who couldn't give a damn about the workers they manage.  Frenetic intemperance, Horvat posits, is the driving force behind corporate gigantism (or monopolistic corporatism). 

Hillaire Belloc, in his seminal text The Servile State (London: T.N. Foulis, 1912), mistakenly I believe labels this same mentality as "capitalist," and he notes that the type of frenetic intemperance Horvat refers to creates a moral strain - a contradiction exists between the accumulation of wealth and the moral base of laws and traditions (Belloc, p. 53).  This means that in time the capitalist economy gives way to one of two evils, socialism or slaverly, (p. 60), of which in reality both are one and the same.  In his book The End of Democracy (Arcadia, CA:  Tumblar House, 2017), Christophe Buffin de Chosal notes that true capitalism is a good thing in that it encourages the investment of saved assets to generate new profit.  But, as he notes on page 123, there is also a negative capitalism, and this one is enabled by big government that often is funded by corporate entities, and thence the problem.  It is a problem which creates a caste system in which, as de Chosal points out on page 69 of his book, discriminates against some in favor of others - the large corporation, for instance, is favored over the small business, and the corporate exec over the data entry clerk.  It also discriminates against the consumer as well, in that the pursuit of wealth on the part of large corporations prioritizes quantity over quality, and cheap junk is marketed to consumers at more-than-invested prices.  That is, inevitably, where problems and inbalances arise, and the average worker in these corporations is forced onto a ferris wheel of mere survival and is often suppressed.  Good, quality work is no longer rewarded, but rather numbers and unrealistic production quotas, which inevitably lead to mistakes and ultimately a tank in quality of work.  This is a sad commentary for sure upon Corporate America, although the powers-that-be could care less.  So, what of the average worker then who has much to offer but is suppressed?   That is where we now go in the next part of the discussion.

The great Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a classic book in 1952 entitled Leisure:  The Basis of Culture, and in it he has some interesting insights.  He notes, beginning on page 43, that the "worker" is characterized by these three personal traits:

1.  Extreme tension of powers of action
2.  A readiness to suffer in vacuo, unrelated to anything.
3.  Complete absorption into the social organism - itself planned to utilitarian ends
(Josef Pieper, Leisure:  The Basis of Culture. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1963)

So, what does Pieper mean?  First, the idea of leisure is seen by this mindset as strange and frivolous: "work for work's sake" is the order of the day.  This describes Corporate America to the proverbial tee - numbers, numbers, and more numbers!  A production-based environment is stressful, and cold managers expect numbers without taking into account variables, and that creates unnecessary and undue stress on the worker.  Pitch-perfect accuracy matters little, as does any other dimension of quality - rather, numbers are the priority.  But, mass-production of any sort ultimately leaders to inperfection, and it does one thing - it forces the consumer to invest in more of the product.  Inferior quality is almost the prime objective of the corporate hack who is bereft of common sense, and if workers don't produce the anticipated numbers, they are deemed useless and disposable, like used tampons in a woman's restroom.  This "corporate exec" mentality is a hazardous bi-product of both Enlightenment thinking and social Darwinism, and it ultimately does diminish God-given personhood.  You don't find this mentality in a lot of small independent businesses, but it is rampant in large mega-corporations.  Until we address this malady in our society, we face an imminent financial collapse as in time the inferior quality and excess quantity of crap product will implode many large corporations, and maybe that is the goal, as Big Business and Big Government also seem to collaborate in a lot of this.  Although it seems like a wild conspiracy, let us now demonstrate it next.

So, the question arises as to if a conspiracy exists between large corporations and centralized governments?  On the surface it doesn't look possible until one looks from the perspective of corporatism, especially its fascist dimension. As the Wikipedia article on corporatism notes, the Italian model of Fascism mandated in the 1920's by Mussolini has as its integral component a corporatist system "in which the economy was collectively managed by employers, workers, and state officials at the national level."   In order for that to happen, influential corporate executives would have to hold some sway, and in a system like that, they indeed would.  Ben Shapiro notes in his book The Right Side of History (New York: Broadside Books, 2019) that even Karl Marx incorporated this into his scheme, and despite Marx's rhetoric of "seizing capital from the bourgeosie" in order to centralize it all into the hands of the state, his scheme needed willing benefactors to make it work, and many of his successors have indeed sought the "unholy alliance" of the corporate tycoon with the statist ideologue, which involved putting at the disposal of the big corporations such apparati as the "eminent domain" privelege, etc.  Also, getting Big Business on-board with a leftist agenda is paramount - the small business which holds to traditional values is then seen as an obstacle, and in order for the corporation to further advance its frontiers, the small business must be closed by legal means, and greasing the palms of the right politicians with cash is a sure way of making that happen.  It is one reason today, as a matter of fact, why big corporations are often unaffected by stringent regulations while small businesses are often forced to comply or close.  As Shapiro notes further in his book on page 140, the catalyst to make all this happen was in the personage of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), although it could be added that Georges Sorel (1847-1922), a Marxist philosopher, equally contributed to this as both of them introduced social Darwinism into economics - this meant a "survival of the fittest" mentality applied to economics in which the stronger multi-national corporation could prevail over and devour smaller business entities, and for the state's economic stability a corporation could use (abuse) state legislation to accomplish doing just that.  It is from this that abominations such as "eminent domain" and over-regulation of industries emerged, and a corporate oligarchy benefitted from codified (albeit unjust) laws.  Therefore statism and corporatism join forces at this point, and to insure corporate interests were advanced and protected, major financial players even from the time of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan sought to place leadership in power to advance their own interests, and it worked.  It is also another reason why the moguls of huge corporations are often the chief financial backers of very leftist causes - the abortion industry, the LGBT agenda, the teaching of evolution in schools, etc.   Like the spokes of a wheel, all of these things go back to one source, and that source is malevolent to the core.  Plineo Correa de Oliviera, in his text Revolution and Counter-Revolution, points out specifically why this conflicts with the Judeo-Christian worldview - on page 80, he notes that the Judeo-Christian worldview and its social manifestations (which he called the Counter-Revolution) does not ally itself with what he called "today's hyper-trophied technicalism," which is characterized by its adoration of novelty, speed, and mechanics, and it also opposes the tendency of such a system to organize human society mechanistically (al a Huxley's Brave New World scenario).  Spiritual values, Oliviera notes, must take precedence over material considerations.  If they don't, then what happens is essentially (and precisely) what de Chosal notes on page 53 of his book - in time, world governments will no longer be the actions of major decisions affecting nations, but rather an oligarchy of major money powers.  The opinions of voters then effectively carry no weight because the voters don't have the money - but, the big corporate entities do.  As he notes on the same page, "democracy" is a political system that enables organized minorities to hold ultimate power, more so if they have limitless financial assets to do so. The needs of the "little guy" are jettisoned in favor of the oligarchy of corporate execs, and hence the problems.  As we will see, it trickles down to how workers are treated as well.

The above is also the reason why I am a Monarchist rather than a Democrat - democracy starts out with mob rule and anarchy, and then a strong force takes it over and turns it into a tyranny.  In the case of monarchy, the king is seen rightly as both servant and father to his people, and he is therefore subject to a higher law with a corporate oligarch fails to recognize.   Monarchy is tied to tradition, a moral code, and a sense of common decency that the corporate exec or political autocrat in a democracy lacks, and the good of others is the main concern of the monarch, and to note this good - also known as the common good - the monarch appeals to something higher than himself.  That something is a combination of divine Revelation and natural law, both of which make a monarch more accountable than either a career politician or corporate executive can be.  Once that order is restored and realized, then a fair advantage is given for the small business to thrive as it should.  Corporations can exist, and in and of themselves are not evil, provided their motivation is honorable.  But, forcing small business competition out of the way by dishonest means, treating employees like automaton droids, and being so greedy that one can't see the higher good doesn't constitute ethical business etiquette, something many of the "Fortune 500" entities have forgotten.  It is high time to recover that sense of decency and honor, and to check the unbridled power of billionaire corporate moguls - they are not above divine law, natural law, nor even state law.

Here is the bottom line to all of this.  First, it is not necessarily wrong to accumulate wealth, as no one should be hindered.  Secondly, in principle large corporations are not wrong either - there are some fine multi-billion dollar corporations out there which provide good services.  Third, however, is that the wealth of individuals and corporations should not be based on practices which are unethical, illegal, or dehumanizing to employees or other businesses.  Fourth, while responsible government is necessary, no government official should be bought, paid-for, and in the back pockets of any corporate entity.  Fifth, all people of creative mind and proper talent should be encouraged to pursue their dreams, free from corporate greed or political interference.   If those five things are recognized and practiced, it could effectively end corporatism and instead lead to a rise in both social betterment and economic growth.  This, I feel, can also only be achieved by one form of governance, and that is Christian monarchy.

Christian monarchy is based on a balance of power - the worker works, the soldier defends, and the noble leads.  This is not to be done in a superior manner that either diminishes personhood, but rather in a way that values contribution.  Such a system, under Biblical precepts would also provide the virtue of charity to those who lack certain abilities through no fault of their own, and in doing so, it shows everyone has value as a creation in God's image.  The corporatist model lacks this in so many ways, in that it stresses the production-based operation, and the result is that only in true Social Darwinian fashion only the most productive carry value while anyone is expendable.  The corporatist model is greed-based and lacks authentic charity, and thus it falls short.  It is the reason why movies such as 1998's Office Space and the film Outsourced from a few years later are popular.  It is also why country singer Johnny Paycheck sang a hit song in the 1970's called "Take This Job and Shove It."  The corporation does not address dignity of personhood (other than a skewered politically-correct version of it, or a lawsuit compels them to) but rather asks "how is this good for the company?"  Also, the stranglehold Corporate America has gained over the American economy has choked the life out of having passion for what one does - people are reflexively programmed to get up at the same time and then sit in little cubicles from the majority of their days, with only one purpose - paying the month's living expenses.  Corporations have stripped quality of life from so many, and it has created a less-inspiring environment in many offices and other workplaces.  Pieper notes the word for such apathy is acedia - basically, this translates as a stick-in-the-mud apathy (Pieper, p. 44).  This acedia is a discontented feeling many of us have, and St. Thomas Aquinas called it a sin against the Third Commandment - taking God's name in vain.   That bears a whole discussion of its own, but what Pieper is saying is that the pursuit of work eventually robs us of reflecting on who and what we are in God, and faith in God is taken for granted or even in vain.  Good point, and the potential source point of a future article!  Essentially, in reading further in Pieper's book, it is adequate to say that leisure and idleness are not the same - you can essentially be busy and idle at the same time, and indeed we get so caught up in working and paying bills this day and age that it makes us complacent and idle in other areas.  We forget things, housework suffers, and Christian service is seen as fruitless and not profitable.   I can definitely see the wisdom in what Pieper says.

In short, Corporate America forces us to sin against the Third Commandment by holding a pink slip over our heads - if we dare pursue higher things, we can lose our livelihood and means of survival.  It is, essentially, tantamount to a form of paid serfdom, but in some aspects feudal serfs were much better off than today's average employees in corporations.

The idea of how Corporate America is exploiting both the personhood of workers as well as national economy is not lost on many writers.  One in particular, political commentator Pat Buchanan, gives a discussion on that in his book The Death of the West (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002).  On pages 32-38, Buchanan makes the following observations about this:

1.  The post-industrial economy has wreaked havoc on the family due to a necessity of two-income households.

2.  Women, being forced into the workplace by economics, are causing an inbalance as many qualified men are losing out due to a combination of radical leftism and greed-driven corporatism.

3.  Birth rates are down in Western society due to the inbalance caused by more women in the workplace.

4.  Because young men are stripped of their fatherhood and family duties, many are left in bad situations, and they are often under-employed or even unemployable.

This inbalance is in line with Pieper's acedia, where large mega-corporations are forcing people into "ruts" and the primary outcome of this is detrimental on a lot of dimensions.  What I have called corporatism earlier is given another name by Buchanan - economism.   Buchanan defines economism as a mirror-Marxist ideology that many is a mere economic animal, and that free-market capitalism is abused to benefit some at the expense of others - the beneficiaries then begin to embrace Horvat's definition of "frenetic intemperance," and an inbalance results.  All of this is orchestrated by the hands of mega-corporations, and their "billionaire boys' club" of leaders have used their influence to manipulate national economies for at least the past 150 years or so.  A lot of it can also be attributed to the theories of the flaming homosexual economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), whose economic theories blended corporate interests with big government, and in a lot of ways Keynes is the progenitor of Corporate America and its excesses. 

This witches-brew of Keynes, Comte, a bunch of corporate billionaires, and their big-government beneficiaries constitutes the main culprit for the nasty inbalance we see in our modern economics, especially when it comes to the personal lives of the average worker.   It is a system that is fundamentally flawed, has the wrong focus, and it violates so many things in regard to the Biblical and Magisterial concepts of dignity of personhood as well as transcendental properties of being such as truth, beauty, and goodness.   Obsession with production and dollars diminishes an appreciation for the greater good and what constitutes it, and in doing so, it diminishes the quality of life God intended for us to have.  On that, we close with a short Scripture lesson.

In Luke 10, Jesus is visiting the home of His good friends Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, whom He'd raised from the dead.  The apparent scenario here was that Jesus was invited by His friends to a dinner at their home, and while Jesus is visiting and imparting some eternal wisdom in informal pre-dinner conversation to others there, Martha is busying herself in the kitchen and is also getting flustered with her sister Mary for not giving her a hand.  Martha finally basically tells Jesus to tell Mary to get the lead out and help her, and Jesus responds in this way (to paraphrase) - "Martha, stop a minute and smell the roses, girl!  Your sister is getting some good stuff here, and you could use it too.  You are so busy you are missing out."   Martha demonstrates a perfect example of Pieper's definition of acedia in his book, as he defines that on page 45 as a deep-seated lack of calm that makes leisure impossible, which eventually manifests outwardly as visible frustration and despair.   Leisure, in the true sense on the other hand, is not equivalent to "being busy," and instead is roughly related to "going with the flow."   It is further defined as a serenity that allows for productive action, but not at the expense of the more important things in life.  Mary in the story exemplifies that leisure - she was not being lazy or shirking her responsibilities, but rather saw a bigger picture and decided to explore it.  This gives an important lesson then for us.

We as a culture are caught up in a malaise of consumer-driven busy-ness, which only serves to enrich the oligarchial "Billionaire Boys' Club" of corporate moguls.  It is rife with distractions, deadlines, and other clutter, and it has gotten us severely out of focus.  As Catholic Christians, it is time to reclaim the focus, and a paradigm shift back towards the family-centered business - true capitalism, in other words - needs to happen.   If it did, I believe people would be more fulfilled.  It is obviously not practical to totally eliminate big corporations, but rather, they need to be kept in check so that they don't violate the opportunities of others.  Until we are able to get it in check, society suffers, and only a radical shift will restore what once was.  Thanks for allowing me to share this lengthy discourse, and hopefully some of this will be a beacon of encouragement to those caught in the corporate "rat race." 

(originally written 9/11/2019)

When Dislike and Complaining Are Good Things

This past Sunday, the parish priest in his homily expounded upon the Gospel reading of the day, which was based on the passage in Luke 10:38-42.  The priest, Fr. Larry Donohoo, brought out a couple of profound points about this passage that most have never considered, and there is a certain amount of liberation in hearing these insights.  I wanted to do my own lesson on this today based on the information I gleaned from Fr. Larry's homily this past Sunday, and it will hopefully give some perspective to others as well.

Let us first look at the Gospel passage itself.  In it, Jesus is invited to the house of his friends, Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus (the same Lazarus Jesus would raise from the dead).  At this visit, apparently Jesus was invited by his hosts to share dinner with them, and while Martha is rushing about getting everything ready, her sister decides to "sit at the feet" of Jesus and sort of drink in His wisdom.  Martha, like any hardworking woman who is trying to prepare a nice dinner, is by this point getting exasperated and she then lets her feelings be known by complaining to Jesus about Mary's apparent laziness and asking Him if He even cares (a little rude for a host to ask a guest, in my observation) that this is going on.  Jesus, in effect, tells Martha to sort of "chill out," and that there is something greater going on here than merely a dinner or Mary shirking her responsibilities to help her sister - as verse 42 of the passage records, He essentially says "You are worried and upset about all these minor details, but your sister is seeing the bigger picture here - you should maybe stop, take a breath, and maybe soak up a little of this great wisdom yourself."  That is not exactly what the text says, but it is the message Jesus is getting across.  Martha's problem, in this case, was fussing over the minor details while missing the bigger picture, which is one application we get from the passage.  It also communicates that Martha was not exactly happy with her sister either, and although we cannot concretely draw a conclusion, perhaps some sibling rivalry and other things were involved, which now leads to what the core dimension I am taking from this entails.

If you will note the passage, although Jesus tells Martha to essentially "chill out," He is not condemning her for complaining.  He also doesn't focus on the aggravation that was between the sisters either - we read nothing of that in the passage either.  However, what we do get from the passage in retrospect is this - there is a sense of familiarity to us about the situation, as many of us have been there at some point.  As a matter of fact, if we read this passage within the overarching context of all Scripture, it makes a couple of enlightening insights to us that Fr. Larry pointed out in his homily and that I intend to expand on shortly.  But, the big takeaway from all this is simply that it is not wrong to be human, and to have human feelings about things.  It means that God is big enough to handle our limitations because he created us.  And, on occasion, he can even use those limitations for his ultimate purpose.  We can now expand on this at this point.

Fr. Larry made two important points about this passage that many of us who have read it over and over throughout the years often miss, and let's take a look at them:

1.  You can dislike someone and still love them - you don't have to like everyone to demonstrate Christian charity.

2.  It is also OK to complain to God about what is bugging you - our prayers don't have to be flowery, poetic, and nice all the time - the prayer of the heart can at times express frustration and even anger, and God is big enough to take it.

Growing up as I did in a fairly traditional Holiness/Pentecostal environment and later converting to the Catholic Church, I too have displayed a flawed sense of what it means to relate to people and to God.  We at times are almost altruistic in the way we deal with others if we are Christians, as we feel an obligation to "be sweet" to everyone and "play nice" even when it drives us out of our minds to do so.  Likewise, in our prayers as well often we think that we always have to sound "religious" in our prayers and that we should emulate some sort of saintly piety, even when we feel otherwise.  When we do that however, we are not being honest with God, and that can create bigger problems.  As Fr. Larry pointed out in his homily, many of the Psalms themselves, as well as even the prayers of some in Scripture, were of a complaining nature - the people praying them were limited human beings with a finite human nature, and often were far from perfect.  And, to be honest, they were not expected to be.  Our dislikes of certain individuals therefore and the frustration we need to vent are also intimately connected, which now leads to some individual insights on both issues.

Let's take the fact that not everyone is likeable, and realistically we should not be expected to like every human being in the world.  To be honest, some people are just, well, a pain you-know-where, and to be honest you want to fish-slap them when you even look at some of these people.  That is natural, and perfectly understandable, because we all have been there if we're honest with ourselves.  It is a universal fact that you are not going to like everyone you encounter, and likewise not everyone is going to like you either - just being you at times will rub people the wrong way, even if you don't intend it to be so.  It is not even that you are necessarily doing anything wrong, but someone just decides you are a person they dislike, and you will be viewed that way by them regardless of how nice you try to be or how friendly you are with them.  And, there are people like that who do that to you as well - you don't know why you cannot stand them, but you just cannot.  In a situation like that however, you ask yourself this question - if that person was to be in a situation where they were in immediate danger, would you try to help them?  If you could honestly answer "yes" to that, then you are actually better off than you thought, because what that means is that as much as you cannot stand them or even intensely dislike that person, you still value them as a human being, and would not deny charity to them if they were in that situation.  Respecting dignity of personhood and valuing any human life transcends a dislike of a person's individual quirks, and if you can see that, you then would actually love that person while not liking them.  Let's now take it to a more personal level.

I am going to talk about my experience with this, as it may help someone else.  As many who know my story have heard, my parents divorced when I was quite young, and for the majority of my childhood I was raised by my divorced mother.  Although my parents are my parents, they were not pleasant people - my father tends to be manipulative and controlling, and even is slightly racist, while my mother is a person who doesn't really care about anyone but herself and does everything she can to make herself as obnoxious and unpleasant to people as she can.  God knows why they are like this, but I have a personal confession to make about them - I dislike both my parents as individuals because neither of them were exactly supportive of me as a kid and to this day I don't feel really all that comfortable being around either one of them.  But, do I love them?  Of course - they are my parents after all, and they are also fellow human beings created in God's image, and in that regard they also share genetic and biological roots with me.  While it can be hoped that they will one day straighten themselves out, at this point both are in their 70's and the likelihood of that happening is negligible at best.   And, that is how I deal with my own struggles in this area.  I also have some very disagreeable in-laws as well that have caused some problems over the years, and the same thing applies to them as well - I cannot stand them personally, but if they were in a bad way I would offer a hand to them.  The crux of Christian charity is rising above the personal feelings without denying them and doing the right thing, even when it involves a person who you cannot stand.  We often hear the phrase that "Jesus loved everybody, and so should we," and indeed that is true - but, Jesus was also fully human as well as being fully God, and there were some people even He could not stand.  Do you think He really liked the Pharisees and scribes who were constantly bugging Him like bothersome gnats?  When you read in Scripture about those accounts, He was not overly thrilled about them honestly, as they disgusted Him with their behaviour, but that didn't mean He didn't love them and indeed, a couple of them (Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea) actually become His disciples later, while another, a guy named Saul, undergoes a dramatic conversion in the Book of Acts and becomes St. Paul, the great Apostle of the the early Church.  Love entails honesty as well as charity, and we have to get the stones as Christians to love people honestly and not just merely "put on the happy face" because of a misconception of the common excuse "that's what Jesus would do."  In other words, Jesus disliked some too, and it is something we inevitably will do ourselves, so let us at least do so with honesty and in time who knows what witness that will be?   A harsh word in honesty will often go further than a dishonest smiley-faced front. 

Nadia Bolz-Webber, the eccentric and somewhat theologically liberal Lutheran pastor who has generated a lot of her own controversy over the years, also has said some things on this subject I personally agree with, although she did so in a somewhat unorthodox and volatile way.  In particular, she did a sermon once called (and forgive me, but I am quoting her title - disclaimer alert!) "God Forgives Assholes."  The gist of that message was simply this - we can forgive but that doesn't mean we have to be the person's best friend.  Dislike can entail forgiveness in other words, and disliking someone is not the sin - it is what we do because of the dislike which determines a lot.  Bolz-Weber herself for instance is someone I actually dislike - her theology is off, she's outlandish in her presentation, and she can come across abrasive and nasty.  Yet, I also have enough Christian charity to acknowledge where she is right (even with strong language in this case) and see a kernel of truth.  Also, Bolz-Webber is not a person I dislike so much I couldn't talk to her - it would be good to maybe sit and have a conversation with her sometime over coffee and a scone and it is possible to even be friendly with those one disagrees with, which is a whole other issue I want to now move to. 

The whole like/dislike thing also has another dimension to it as well - there are some people we may be 100% in agreement with as far as politics, theology, worldview, etc., are concerned, but for some reason we may not be able to stand to be around them.  On the other hand, there are people who may be polar opposites of the spectrum from us, yet for some reason they can become some of our dearest friends.  Especially among those of us who are more conservative theologically and socially (as I am), this has generated a lot of debate and controversy over the years, and I am going to cite a couple of historic examples.  I have gained a lot in recent years from reading the works of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), and his seminal text The Twilight of Civilization (1939) is one of the most profound things I have read (in the future, I have a few insights I want to share from it too here).  He is fairly orthodox as a Catholic scholar, and much of his material has great relevance for our time.  But, when talking with fellow conservatives and traditionalists, an issue regarding Maritain comes up - one of his best friends was Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), who was a cultural Marxist and also exerted a lot of influence over many people - Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and others - who have been responsible for the detriment in our society in recent decades.  Does Maritain's friendship with Alinsky nullify the relevance of his works for orthodox Catholic writers?   I would say personally for me it wouldn't.  While his friendship is not one of the best highlights of his legacy, Maritain was still a great philosopher and he wrote many good works that a Catholic in good faith can glean wisdom from.  Likewise, there is the great Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), who has two very good (and solidly orthodox) texts I use frequently entitled Catholicism (1938) and The Splendor of the Church (1956), which was quite insightful in my understanding of the Creeds.  However, de Lubac also had a controversial association with another Jesuit cleric by the name of Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a quasi-heretical theologian who unfortunately pushed transhumanism, modernism, and theistic evolution onto Catholic thought, and has done some serious damage.  By all indications, I don't note any Teilhardism in de Lubac's writings that I have read, but they were noted as being good friends regardless.  So, does that mean that I cannot use de Lubac's works for insights?  Not at all - as a matter of fact, the rule of thumb I have with anything is that where it is consistent with historic faith, it is to be preserved, while anything in opposition to historic faith is to be chucked out.  Other controversial friendships over the years have included famed Southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor's association with mystic and questionable theologian Thomas Merton, and also Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar's friendship with Protestant theologian Karl Barth.  Even in the political spectrum too, many unlikely allies can be found on occasion - two of note are the openly gay Milo Yiannapolis and transgender Blaire White, who surprisingly are also aligned with the conservative political position on many things.  Yet, on the other end of that argument, I often see some of the nastiest people who otherwise share my views on many things too, but I cannot stand to be around them - one that comes to mind here is evangelist Jimmy Swaggart.  I could also add others from "televangelist land" to that list, such as Pat Robertson or John Hagee, not to mention a number of what we call "rad-Trad" Catholics who are openly anti-semitic and uncharitable despite their being orthodox and correct in many other areas.  The complexities of human relationships make the subject of like/dislike somewhat more complicated that surface impressions - it is highly possible to like those who have radically different worldviews as friends while disliking others who may share your convictions but may be total jackasses as human beings.  But, while it is natural and not wrong to like or dislike different individuals, it is imperative that we love them as fellow human beings regardless who they are as individuals, and an extreme situation such as a natural disaster or an accident on the highway will determine that quickly. 

The second point that Fr. Larry brought up in this whole discussion is the idea of complaining.  When it comes to prayer, many of us have a preconceived notion of what constitutes an authentic prayer, and we think that if we stray from those conventions somehow we dishonor God.  However, in looking at both the accounts in Scripture as well as just practical everyday life, we as human beings are not always holy and sanctimonious, and we deprive ourselves of many things when we try to put up fronts and avoid honesty about ourselves.  God wants us to be open with him, and to be honest we have nothing to lose with doing so because he already knows us better than we do ourselves.  What that means then is that we go to him with our needs, and we do so as honestly and openly as possible, and sometimes that may not be pretty!  Over the years, I have had more shouting matches and fights with God than many will ever know, and I have cussed him out on occasion, given him ultimatums, and threw some nasty tantrums at him - I wouldn't dare divulge that to everyone in detail obviously, and let me just say that if someone were ever to hear one of those moments, I would probably have my own Christianity questioned.   Thankfully, God doesn't see it that way, and often things are not as they appear - often, the most intense, seemingly hostile fits we throw in our prayers at times are the very things that remind us of how much we do rely on God, and the fact we would not be even talking to him at all if we didn't believe in him.  Faith is a mysterious thing that can take a lot of manifestations, and that may even be anger and frustration at times - remember, for instance, the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32:22-32?  Jacob said he wasn't going to let go of the mysterious stranger (seen by the Church as an early typology of Jesus) until he was blessed, and he walked with a limp after that "prayer meeting!"  Also, just like with our spouses and other loved ones, conflict happens, and the arguments at some point are inevitable as you are not always going to agree on everything with even the person you love the most - why should God be any different in that regard?  Difference is though, usually God ends up being right anyway, and just like that spat with our spouse that happens, once everyone cools down apologies happen and life goes on - I have had to apologize to God a lot on occasion, and thankfully he is always forgiving of me, perhaps more than I am of myself.  So, the next time you don't feel the "joy, joy, joy down in your heart" when you pray and you instead feel like giving God a tongue-lashing, it doesn't mean you are any less spiritual or reverent toward God - you still love him, he still loves you, and perhaps he allows you to vent in order for you to ultimately feel better.  Or, in the case of Job when Job was complaining, God gently will remind us once we cool down that perhaps we didn't see the full picture, and that maybe we acted out of haste before we thought things out - I do that, you do that, and practically every human being alive has done it if we are all honest with ourselves.  So, yes, you can complain as a form of prayer too, and there would be something seriously wrong with you honestly if you didn't at least once in your lifetime.  Your love for God, just like your love for your spouse, should go deeper than any emotional outburst, and at the end of the day you know the love is there despite how ticked off you might get.  And, without sounding silly and somewhat formulaic, I will nonetheless say that God is also a big boy, and he can take it - he transcends us on so many levels anyway, and he sees past the frustration we may feel and will deal often with the root issue that the frustration stems from in the first place.

I am hoping that this series of rambling observations will be encouraging for you, as I know that some reading this may have struggled in these areas.  It's OK, in other words, and perhaps this is the very bit of wisdom you need at this moment, or perhaps you have a past situation that now in retrospect you can see you were probably better off than you thought you were at the time - no, God is not going to deep-fry you in the grease pit of hell just for getting a little emotional or not being able to stand to be around someone else.  Those feelings are completely normal, and as long as you have the wisdom to know the difference for instance between dislike and hate, you will be fine.  Thanks again for allowing me to share, and will see you soon.

Pleading the Blood - The Truth

As a convert to the Catholic Church from the Pentecostal tradition, there is something I have been pondering for some time that needs a solid teaching, and that is this whole idea that many Pentecostals and Charismatics have about "pleading the Blood of Jesus" over everything and anything.   The question here is - is "pleading the Blood" even Biblical?   That is what we want to explore. 

Among Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, the practice of "pleading the Blood" is a common one, and almost a tradition among them.  For years, I even prayed that sort of stuff myself even.  But, even as I participated in it, something in the back of my mind - a still, small voice if you will - kept gnawing at me and asking, is this right to do?  The more that voice asserted itself, the more I was coming to realize that perhaps the Holy Spirit was trying to say something to me about it, so I thought I had better explore the question a little more.  And, so I did.  Here is what I came up with.

When the Blood of Christ is mentioned in Scripture, it essentially is in reference to two things:

1.  The forgiveness of sins through the Atonement.
2.  Healing of the physical body as another promise of the Atonement.

The application of the Blood of Jesus then is tied to what we as Catholics would understand as sacramental grace - due to the fact it entails both the forgiveness of our sins and the healing of our bodies, for the Catholic the Blood is tied into at least three of the seven Sacraments of the Church - the Eucharist, Confession, and Unction.  If that is the case then, why do so many of our Pentecostal brethren attempt to "plead the Blood" over their cars, finances, and other things then?   That is where we need to consult the pages of Scripture to see where this idea comes from.

Many Pentecostals who engage in this practice point to one thing in particular that they can gain some justification for their idea from, and that is Exodus 12:7 - prior to the event of the Exodus itself, the Israelites in Egypt were instructed at the first Passover to slaughter an unblemished lamb and sprinkle its blood on the doorposts of every home to protect it from the judgment God was about to mete out on the Egyptians, in this case the death of the first-born son of every house.  The Exodus was indeed a foreshadowing of the coming of Christ, but it doesn't mean that every event deserves repetition - what God told Israel to do literally at that time has no bearing on the promises of the Atonement, as rather we see it as a typology of the Atonement in that it symbolized God's salvation of His people from destruction, that is all.  For the ancient Israelites, it was a literal deliverance and salvation from the bondage of Egyptian slavery, but for us as Christians it is the liberation from the effects of death and sin.   It must be understood that everything that happened in the Old Testament were real events, but at the same time God used real events to point people to Christ - that is the bottom line of why Scripture is important to us in retrospect.  Christ is at the center of all Scripture, and thus everything points to His personhood and His divinity.  It doesn't mean though that we as modern Christians have to repeat every single action we read about in Scripture though, which is a major weakness with many faithful Pentecostal people.

Pentecostals often try to bring into the present a past event like the Exodus by pointing to some New Testament references for their justification, such as I Corinthians 5:7, where Jesus is rightly called our "New Passover Lamb."  They also take passages such as Hebrews 12:24 and I Peter 9:26-28, both of which refer to the sacrifice of Himself Christ did for us to redeem us and forgive us our sins, as a model for their practice.  Other passages, such as Romans 3:25, are used as well in speaking metaphorically of Jesus as a lamb, and these things are taken as a mandate by some Pentecostals to do exactly what the passage says - applying the Blood - to every aspect of life in order to gain some sort of special merit.  They however fall short here, as the references in Scripture would more aptly point to the Passion of Christ, and thus would be more in line with the Catholic position of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which is for our salvation.   And, it therefore reduces the Precious Blood to a talisman or a mere pious superstition, which is what I want to talk about now.

It is important to understand that trivializing holy things and reducing them to some sort of magic act is tantamount to blasphemy, and many well-meaning Pentecostals who "plead the blood" over everything from their doorposts to their diamond rings don't realize what they are truly doing when they do that.  It in essence reduces the Blood to a mere pious "tradition of men" and a quasi-occultic talisman and it makes those who do such things minimize the true benefits of Christ's sacrificial act for us.  I have talked in the past of various manifestations of what is known as "charismatic witchcraft," and the more I understand how erroneous this whole "plead the blood" practice is, the more I am becoming convinced that it is a form of witchcraft.  If anyone reading this is doing it, stop immediately - by denigrating the ultimate gift of God to save us in such a way, you commit blasphemy without knowing it.  This leads to one final observation before I conclude.

Many people who are engaged in this practice of "pleading the blood" are often also some of the most virulently anti-Catholic individuals - they mock the Eucharist, and make allegations against Catholics by saying we supposedly "crucify Jesus all over again."  In reality, that is not what the doctrine of the Eucharist is about, and as I explained in my studies on Scott Hahn's The Lamb's Supper, it doesn't have anything to do with that.  But, to humor those who would say such a thing and make dumb accusations, let's say that it did - they criticize Catholics for the Eucharist, yet they throw the blood of Christ around like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, so who is being more disrespectful?   As we have noted several times before, the Eucharist is Biblically-based, and it also has substantiation for its observance over two thousand years of Church history.  The whole "pleading the blood" practice though does not - it is less than a century old, and many of those who teach it are also dubious in other areas as well, as they are mostly televangelists on religious television who do a number of other outlandish things and try to blame the Holy Spirit for it.  Some Pentecostals and Charismatics like painting themselves as "spiritually elite," yet in this and so many other areas, they often show a woeful lack of spiritual maturity, and as a result many of them fall away fast when the pressures of life challenge them.  A good recent example is a former classmate of mine from my undergraduate days who recently has taken a shocking turn in his life.  When we were in school together over 20 years ago, this guy was noted for being a super-charismatic - he was on staff at one of the biggest megachurches around then, and he was so Charismatic in his practice that people got the impression that he was some sort of spiritual powerhouse.  This guy was also a good friend back in the day too - we talked a lot about many things, and when he later became a priest in an Old Catholic group of some sort, he often would call me to "pick my brain" on things regarding the Eastern Church and such.  However, only a few short years ago, it was almost as if he fell off the face of the earth, as I lost touch with him.  When I found him on social media some years later, he had drastically changed - he ended up divorcing his wife, moving to Asia, and by all appearances he has embraced the "gay lifestyle" and spends a lot of time photographing semi-nude male models in weird poses.   This was one of those people who engaged in the practice of "pleading the blood" at one point, and at this time he is engaging now in a sort of revisionism of the lives of the saints and of Christian doctrine itself by making it more "gay-friendly" - one of his recent things he wrote about was part of the whole "gay Christian" appropriation, for instance, of certain saints of the Church (in this case, Saints Sergius and Bacchus) by recasting them as "gay lovers" based on the mis-translation of some Greek word.  One of what used to be the most on-fire Pentecostals I knew, in other words, is now an activist for the LGBT community and is resorting to blasphemy and historical revisionism to justify himself.   It is a slippery slope to base faith and religious belief on emotions, as it can have some catastrophic consequences, and the whole "pleading the blood" idea sounds good, but in reality it can cause a lot of damage, as can any blasphemous or heretical practice. 

I may have gotten a bit harsh toward the end of the last paragraph, but I do so with good reason - the miracle of salvation and of the fact that God Himself became man to save us is a precious thing, and I would even go as far as to say that the decision one makes to follow Christ is the most important life choice one could ever make, as it is for eternity (or, more correctly, has eternal consequence).  Especially in a society that grows more irreligious and secular (the culmination of almost 400 years of Enlightenment influence), it is vital that we approach Christ with a spirit of humility and of reverence, two things sorely lacking among many who profess Christianity of any sort today.   One reason I am no longer Pentecostal myself is due to that very thing - while there are many fine people who are devout Christians in Pentecostal groups to which this doesn't apply, there are also many more who display an arrogance and just a nasty attitude that in no way reflects the Lord they claim to serve, and also lacks the fruit of the Holy Spirit they claim to revere.  They turn out to be obnoxious jackasses to be honest, and anyone who is around such people quickly picks up on that too - it nullifies any potential Christian witness that such people could have had.  Often it is these sort of people who flippantly throw around the whole "plead the blood" schtick as part of their own little pious masquerade, and they don't understand the implications of their behavior.  They will one day have blood, in other words - the blood of many people they could have reached but did not crying from their own hands.   That blood will have a different sort of plea - the plea of those who died in their sins for justice against those who could have showed them the way but didn't.   That is frankly not a plea one should desire to hear, as it is a hallmark of shame.   On that note, I want to now conclude with a few challenges for some different groups of people.

If you are one of those Pentecostals, Charismatics, or even Evangelicals or Catholics who has gotten caught up in the whole "pleading the blood" practice, I challenge you as Saint Paul did young Timothy to "study to show yourselves approved" by educating yourself on what the true purpose of Christ's Blood is about.  As you do so, renounce what you have been doing, and ask God to forgive you for it, as you need to get this right.  If you are a person who has been hurt by this sort of thinking and either have come to your senses or maybe were at the receiving end of some Pentecostal nut throwing the Blood around flippantly, I first offer an apology to you on behalf of Christians as a whole, and also would ask that you not let this color your perception of Christians nor hinder you from examining the claims of Scripture and of Christ for yourself.   "Traditions of men" such as "pleading the blood" over one's favorite shoes and other such nonsense have done more harm to the evangelistic mission of the Church than many realize, and it is important to discard those things and focus on true belief and faith instead.  NO ONE should be hindered from receiving a chance to accept Jesus Christ and believe in Him, and no fruity, overly-pious, goofy Charismatic fad should hinder anyone in doing so either.  The time has come for Christians to stop playing games with their faith and with the fates of others, as we live in a world that is increasingly hostile to the truth of God's Revelation, and we cannot afford any messing around, as that could create innocent martyrs.   This was a tough message to write today, but hopefully it will impact others who read it.  God bless until next time. 

The Three Promises

When someone accepts the claims of Christ and trusts in Him for the ultimate promise of salvation, a covenantal relationship happens.  Christ promises several things based on that relationship to those who follow Him, and there are three promises, in particular, I wanted to deal with today.  First, however, I wanted to clarify some things prior to getting into the actual discussion.

To begin, it must be understood that the promises I will be talking about are not contingent upon salvation, but are rather fruits of salvation.  There are actually a couple of promises though that are contingent upon salvation, and they are made possible through sacramental grace - the first is forgiveness of sins (which is represented through both the sacraments of baptism and reconciliation) and healing of the whole person (primarily represented by the sacrament of unction).  The two of those are always tied together, as they both represent a type of restoration that Christ fulfilled in His Atonement.  As we go through our pilgrimage of faith though, it doesn't take a degree in rocket science to understand that we are still in this natural world, and thus are still subject to certain necessities that are warranted by the process of life and survival itself.  Those promises are given by God throughout Scripture in many places we will be discussing, and they are the result of the covenantal relationship of faith we have in Christ.  There are three of those promises that are specific to our discussion, and each will be discussed at length momentarily - provision for our needs, protection from damage of adversity, and direction for important decisions and choices we make.  Upon those three promises are what rest our trust in God beyond the grace of salvation, and are not conditional to salvation but are residual benefits we receive.

Over the years, teachings on similar things have been taken out of focus, and we will deal with specific cases of that later as we discuss each of these three promises individually.  However, the purpose of those three promises is to provide the stability to do that which God has called each of us to.  Especially if you are in full-time service to the Church, these promises are crucial, as often a sacred vocation is not something that will land one in the "Fortune 500" or on a high-society registry.  With that being established, let us now take each promise and initiate our discussion on them individually.

A.  Provision of Needs

If you are like me, you often find yourself placing a priority on financial concerns and other needs in your daily prayers, and in this day and age finances seem to dominate our prayers for some reason.  Does God grant material needs?  Looking at Philippians 4:19, we see our first and pivotal verse about this - it says "God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory."   Let us unpack this a little, as at times this is a big one which has generated its own plethora of misunderstandings and misapplications.  The first thing that comes to mind for many is the stereotypical image of the televangelist on religious television programs making statements such as "if you sow a seed, you'll meet a need."  The term for this type of "teaching" is either Positive Confession or "Word of Faith," and its detractors call it "Name it and claim it" or "blab it and grab it."  This faulty application, as we discussed earlier, has its genesis in what is known as the New Thought movement, which itself was a derivative of Christian Science.  In the early 1900s, a Baptist minister by the name of Esseck William (E.W.) Kenyon (1867-1948), who began teaching some ideas that were similar to the New Thought understanding of words creating reality (R.M. Riss, "Kenyon, Esseck William," in Burgess, Alexander, McGee, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements.  Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 1988. p. 517).  This later entered the Salvation/Healing Movement among American Pentecostals via first Oral Roberts, who first taught the idea of "sowing seed," and later was more associated with Kenneth Hagin (1917-2003), who was a tent-revival Assemblies of God evangelist who later was considered the "founding father" of the Word of Faith movement.   Hagin, and the dozens of his proteges such as Kenneth Copeland, Frederick Price, and others, emphasized a teaching that centered on an uncompromising faith via "positive confession" (meaning speaking things essentially into existence that are not there as a work of exercising that faith) in God's desire to bless in every area of life provided no doubt entered the picture.  This has at its core a Biblical truth (based on Philippians 4:19 and other such passages) that was taken, twisted, and made to be something it was never originally intended.  It is important to understand that the key word in the Philippians verse is needs.   Over the years, Hagin and his myriad of successors and imitators (most prominent today being Joel Osteen) have twisted this idea in such a way that essentially they thought it was possible for God to even grant wants (or more aptly and rhythmically, greeds) and they taught people to treat this promise as if it were a quasi-occultic talisman or something, and that is where we have some serious problems.  I want to spend a little time on this now, as it is pivotal to the discussion.

If what Hagin and others like him taught were true, a little common sense would dictate that results would be obvious - the mega-church parking lots where many of these people spout this stuff should be overflowing with Mercedes Benzes, Lamborghinis, and Lincolns, and instead of asking for more money, those preaching that message would supposedly have so much that they'd be giving it away and living by "sowing their own seeds," would they not?   Sadly, this is not the reality - oftentimes, those who are sucked in by the heretical "Word of Faith" teachings are often among the poorest, and those who teach it are the only ones benefitting from it, as they fly around in multi-million dollar private planes and live in palatial estates that were financed by people who often cannot even afford a bicycle, much less an Oldsmobile.  And, it also begs the question too - I am in no position to judge the hearts or intentions of such "teachers," but it seems to me that if they truly believed what they tell others, they would be handing out cash to everyone because they would have more of it than they know what to do with.  Yet, I don't see that - people who "sow a seed" to these people are often on the verge of losing their homes, or cannot afford to feed their families or pay their bills, yet they are not seeing Kenneth Copeland knocking on their door to help them, do they?   Hence, in the well-worn but appropriate axiom, the emperor has no clothes.  However, there is a more balanced way to look at this, and that is where the crux of my teaching here rests.

In Philippians 4:19, we are told that God will supply all of our needs, and this generates some questions.  First, what is a need?  To answer that,  a need is something that is vital to a person's stability and survival, while a want is a luxury that someone could actually live without.  Needs like this include food, shelter, utilities, reliable transportation, and financial resources to cover those things.  They may not be anything pretty - for instance, you may have a need for transportation, but God provides either a 1980 Chevy with a bad paint job or enough cash to provide a bus ticket - but it is a need that is met.   When we look in Scripture, we see a lot of examples of that type of provision being made, notably in I Kings 17:2-16, where Elijah is fed by ravens in a cave, or in 2 Kings 4 where his disciple Elisha stays with a poor widow and she manages on meager rations to have enough to feed her son and Elisha while the latter stays with her.  We also see it even with Jesus Himself, in the feeding of the five thousand - a couple of loaves and a few stinky fish feed a huge number of people and provide a need for satisfying a pang of hunger.  These are examples of God supplying needs.  One could also point out in Exodus the manna and quails God provided for the Israelites to eat in the wilderness - although they were not satisfied with it, those manna bits and quails supplied a need.  These Scriptural examples are something that should show us the perspective God comes from on this - he does care for us, and because he created the natural order he knows very well those things we need to survive, and if we put our trust in Him, He will take care of us.  And, that is the proper context of the idea.

Also in the context of supplying needs, there is a sort of meritocracy involved.  This meritocracy has nothing to do however with our salvation, as that cannot be earned, but rather it has to do with being awarded the fruits of our labor.  If you have a certain level of skill, education, or experience, then you deserve to have an occupation that provides dividends.  To divert any confusion on this, it in no way is the same sort of nonsense that Kenneth Hagin and his successors proclaim - you don't just get something for nothing, as that is not how the natural order of things works.  However, if you work toward something, then doors can open, and you deserve to harvest the fruits of your labor - this is reminiscent of a truth embodied in James 2:20 which is wrongly applied by some sects as being soteriological but rather is meritocratic - "faith without works is dead."  It also doesn't mean the incorrect saying "God helps those who help themselves" either, as that comes from Enlightenment-era Deism and Freemasonry and is not Biblical, although there is a valid principle at its core.  What it means simply is this - if you do your part, God will provide the increase to it, rewarding faithful labor.  Personal success then doesn't get handed to someone on a silver platter - you work toward it, and thus it is cultivated fruit and not a "faith promise." 

Noting all of these things, the provision of our needs then summarily consists of two dimensions:

1.  Our basic necessities will be covered if we trust in God to do so, but they may not be luxurious provisions yet will meet the need we have.

2.  Personal success cannot be "confessed," but rather is the result of merit in the area we are striving to achieve something, be it the promotion at work we have invested a lot of hard work into earning, or that graduate degree we have studied hard to achieve.  This is not a "positive confession," but rather a cultivated fruit that will not be given to someone who doesn't invest the effort into it on a silver platter.

3.  Provision of our needs is not a clause of our salvation, but rather is a fruit of walking in our salvation.

B.  Protection From the Damages of Adversity

This is another interesting promise God has made, and again, what it entails is not freedom from adversity, but rather the strength to overcome it and come out better.  Adversity is a fact of life we all face - as a consequence of the Fall, adversity is a sure bet at some point in all of our lives, and it is inescapable.  The question is not if we face adversity, but rather when, and how we face it.  The primary passage in Scripture that addresses this is the famous "Armor of God" passage in Ephesians 6:10-18, and accompanying that is another verse from Isaiah 54:17 - "No weapon formed against me will prosper."  In my personal prayer time every morning, I always "put on" the armor of God based on the promise in Isaiah that weapons pointed at me will not take me down, and it's actually a good prayer to have.  Let us unpack this some more, shall we?

What is the purpose of wearing armor after all?  It is to protect the soldier in battle, not to help the soldier avoid battle.  If the battle could be avoided, the armor would not be needed - that is just plain common sense, right?   Within the passage of Ephesians 6 that deals with this, the reason for the armor is given from the outset, that we might stand in the "evil day."  So, what is an "evil day" then?  It is not a collective event, as every one of us faces an "evil day" at some point.  If you are on social media, for instance, and you are standing up for your faith and traditional values, inevitably someone will get "triggered" and go on the attack - the moment that happens is an "evil day."  Or, it could be while you are shopping and a thug attempts to mug you at an ATM - that also is an "evil day" when it happens.  The "evil day" when is that moment when we face adversity of some sort, and it may scare and intimidate us.  But, if we trust in God, eventually it works out, because as Romans 8:28, all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose.  Even a bad situation can be clay in the Master Potter's hand, and He can use that to mold and shape our character.  I want to now go to two prime examples of this in Scripture, and then I want to share how in retrospect this has worked in my life.

Let's first look at the story of Joseph, one of the progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and a son of Jacob (his favorite actually) which we begin to read about in Genesis 37 and continues until the end of the book, as the story of Joseph is even longer in some aspects than that of Abraham, his great-grandfather.  Joseph is essentially spoiled rotten and protected by his father Jacob, so much so that he is given special treatment and even given a very expensive piece of clothing.   This arouses the jealousy of his brothers, who actually entrap him and sell him to some Arab slave-traders who in turn sell him to Potiphar, a high official in the Pharaoh's government.  God uses this experience to bring Joseph to where he wants him to be, as Joseph had a lot of bizarre dreams and they led him to this point.  However, adversity strikes again when that hussey of a wife of Potiphar's tries to molest Joseph, and he flees but is falsely accused of trying to molest her - this lands him in prison, where he has a series of dreams that get the attention of the Pharaoh eventually (I am abbreviating details of the story of the butler and baker), and he ends up in effect becoming the Pharaoh's prime minister - not bad for a nomad's son from Palestine, is it?   Adversity struck Joseph hard, in other words, but God preserved him.  We also see a similar situation in the story of Job too, in which Job is attacked mercilessly by Satan to try to prove God wrong, but Job prevails and is abundantly blessed later for it.  Again, that whole Romans 8:28 thing comes in.

It is true also in my own life too - when I was around 9 years old, my mother and I ended up in a chaotic situation that left us dirt-poor and destitute for a number of years.  Yet, during that time, I worked at my studies, and eventually, I was able to complete both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.  God made the way possible, and often in lieu of less-extreme circumstances I admittedly forget that and get impatient with Him, but He reminds me of where I came from.  One other aspect of adversity is that it is in a sense the fertilizer in which character grows.  The sweet-smelling roses or succulent tomatoes we often enjoy from our gardens and flower boxes are often nourished by the foulest and nastiest fertilizer - ground-up cow dung, decaying animal carcasses, etc.  Yet, out of that mess grows the beautiful rose or the succulent vegetable.  That is how the adversity we face in life often works to our benefit.  It is also why we pray for God to protect us - we don't pray necessarily for him to protect us from the adversity, but rather from being destroyed by the adversity.  What often is meant for our destruction can actually be exactly what we need to grow us, and that is one reason God allows the adversity to happen, but he also will help us navigate through it. 

In summary, there are two things to glean from God's promise of protection:

1.  We are often not spared from going through the adversity itself but are equipped to go through it without lasting damage.

2.  Adversity is not necessarily evil, although it may have initially been intended to be so - rather, it is a chance to cultivate and grow our character.

C.  Direction for Important Decisions and Choices

Have you ever been in a position where a life-changing decision has faced you, and you are not sure what to do?  If you go one direction, it may have one consequence, yet if you go another, it could have other consequences.  The permanence of the consequences for whatever decisions we make can make or break us, and thus they are things that cannot be entered into lightly.  As Christians, God has clearly promised to guide and direct us in all we do, and it is our responsibility to trust him to keep that promise.  Again, Romans 8:28 comes into play,  as all things do work together for our good.  In this context, the rightness or wrongness of our decision is not the factor, as even when we screw up God can use that to bring us to the place he wants us.  Rather, it is about relying on God to make the appropriate decision for the current situation, and in doing so it requires a lot of trust.

There are two main passages besides Romans 8:28 that relate to this promise.  The first is in Psalm 119:105 - "Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path."  The second is Psalm 37:23 - "the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord."  A third and very important verse is also related to this, in that we should expect and accept nothing less than clear spiritual direction, and that verse is in I Corinthians 14:33 - God is not the author of confusion.  I am going to discuss various aspects of this now, as they are very important to the study.

We as human beings are limited, and as a result, bad decision-making at some point is inevitable.  A bad choice or decision on an important issue can lead to a lot of negative impact for our lives and those of our family, so obviously these things are not to be taken lightly.  When we rely on God for direction, we should pray for and expect nothing less than a clear answer.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with His faithfulness, but rather with our own propensity to go on feelings and other misleading criteria.  To see an example of how this works, we look at the story of Gideon in Judges 6:36-40.  In that account, Gideon was the de facto leader (judge) of all of Israel, and as his people moved toward their Promised Land, they faced a lot of obstacles - hostile tribes such as the Midianites in this case.  Gideon knew that based on his own wisdom he could not strategize successfully to battle the Midianites threatening his people's camp, so he did something interesting.  In order to get God's direction, Gideon took a wool fleece, and based on whether it was wet or dry, he would take it as God's direction to render his decision.  He wanted to be absolutely sure he was doing the right thing, so he did this test three times, and God did what he asked all three times.  The result was a successful battle and a momentous win for the people of Israel, and it got them closer to their destination. 

In my Pentecostal days, it was often a common practice to "put a fleece before the Lord" in order to discern the proper way to go about making a decision, something I still do today I might add.  Many times it works, and I have been able to do some remarkable things because I sought God's direction in that way.  I don't recommend that this be done in every circumstance, as it can degenerate into superstition, but it can and does prove to be an effective way to get a solution to a problem.  Another practice related to this that some do is the discipline of fasting.   Fasting is typically to be observed as an act of self-denial in order to draw close to God, and over the years I have learned it is never proper to fast for direction, as this amounts to essentially just a "hunger strike" to get what one wants from God, and it doesn't work that way.  Fasting is first and foremost an act of worship - you are denying self to give God more of a central place in your life.  If you fast for simple direction, it will not avail much as God is not the object of the discipline, but rather your need is.  That is why I would never suggest that anyone fast for direction - you fast as an act of adoration, not to get something.  Many Pentecostals have misunderstood that over the years, and it was only after understanding Lenten devotion better that I learned how to observe fasting and abstinence properly.  It is my hope that more of these people who have a misunderstanding about the discipline of fasting would see the light as well.

In summary, there are two things we understand about God's promise to give us direction:

1.  If we seek divine guidance, we need to ask that it be given to us in a clear way, to avoid the confusion with our own feelings.

2.  It is OK to do a tangible expression of seeking direction - such as a "fleece" - but never use the spiritual discipline of fasting and abstinence in that regard.

Now that I have explored these promises in detail, it is time to add some concluding thoughts.

Conclusion

There are many more things that could be said on this topic, and one area I wanted to touch on but forgot to do so is the practice of "pleading the blood of Jesus" as an act of asking for protection.  I have decided to do a separate study on that later, as honestly, it would take more detail to talk about that, but it is needed teaching for sure as many (including until recently myself) have misunderstood that.  However, as a precursor to that, let me just say this - the precious and sacred should never be reduced to mere talismans, for then they become the focal points of our faith rather than God Himself, and that is a form of witchcraft.  Again, I will deal more in-depth with that at another time though.

I hope this study, like other insights I have shared, will be a help to someone, as it is my prayer that what I write here will be used of God to touch others and make an impact.  If it does, you are always welcome to share it.  Until next time, thank you for allowing me to share my own insights with you, and hopefully will be back soon.

Dealing With Anti-Semitism Masquerading as "Pro-Life" and "Conservative"

Over the past few days, a couple of social media groups I have been part of have engaged in some discussions which, frankly, have me a bit concerned.  One of the groups called the "Pro-Life and Anti-Communist League," has had an influx of people spouting some very volatile and controversial stuff on it, and frankly, it needs to be addressed.   I am only going to deal with this briefly as I don't want to get into a discussion that is too detailed, but some things need to be said.

Many of the people in this particular group profess to be "traditional Catholics," and to be honest, when I see someone who identifies as a "traditional Catholic" yet spews anti-semitic vitriol, I immediately become skeptical of their professed Catholic faith.  As I am about to demonstrate, it is perfectly fine to do two things in regard to the issue of the Jews:

1.  It is acceptable to criticize some policies of the modern state of Israel without diminishing support for Israel.  Despite any special status Israel has in God's overall plan of salvation, the modern nation of Israel is still led by fallible human beings, and they are not perfect - none of us are honestly.  You can fully support anything but also disagree with an action in connection with that which you support, so that is not the issue.

2.  The salvation of the Jews in lieu of the evangelical mission of the Church is also a valid concern.  We should share Christ's love with everyone, and that includes Jewish people.  As you will see later, it is not only acceptable but also necessary to share the Gospel with Jesus's own people, the Jews.  To do so is an act of love, not hate.  And, therefore, the salvation of Jewish people is not the issue either.

The real issues in regard to this subject are as follows, and thus the anti-semitism

1.  "Jewish conspiracy" theories - when you start hearing comments about how "all bankers and Hollywood executives are Jews," it should send up a red flag immediately.  I have heard some of this talk on the social media pages I have mentioned, and it is an excuse for an anti-semite to use religion to justify hatred of the Jews, which is not the message of the Gospel. Although there are a lot of Jews who are in positions of leadership in politics, banking, etc., it doesn't mean that they as individuals are somehow the fault of the whole Jewish people as a group.  Many of the worst of these people are who they are oftentimes in spite of their Jewish heritage, and not because of it.  Many of these evil individuals over the centuries - George Soros, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, etc. - were actually atheistic and had rejected their Jewish roots and upbringing, and much of what they stand for would be in direct contradiction with the traditional Jewish worldview as embodied in both Talmudic tradition as well as their adherence to the Torah as moral law.  This same sort of argument is often used by those espousing anti-Catholic views as well - some Fundamentalists, for instance, try to point out that Hitler's Nazis were inspired by the Catholic Church when in reality they were directly opposed to it.  Catholics would be wise to be more careful about trying to use this argument to buttress anti-semitism then.

2.  The argument that "Talmudic Judaism is not compatible with Catholic faith" is a serious fallacy, and often the person spouting it is ignorant of what the Talmud actually is.  The Talmud is not a monolithic authority in the same way Scripture is but is defined as a "comprehensive term for Jewish tradition transmitted orally from generation to generation until finally committed to writing." (Rabbi Ben Isaacson and Deborah Wigoder, The International Jewish Encyclopedia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice-Hall, 1973. p. 290).  It must be understood that the Talmud is not a single book either, as the complete collection of it would fill a small library, and like the law books you see in many attorney's offices, it documents discussions on how Jewish moral and ceremonial law is to be implemented - and, within its content are debates and even differing opinions about how those things are implemented, so it is not necessarily authoritative on its own for Jews, but rather provides guidance as to what is to be done in a specific situation.  As Wigoder and Isaacson note, the vastness of the work even includes much irrelevant and even at times offensive content, but it also is, in essence, the symbolism of the continuance of the Jews as a people, and thus its importance cannot be underestimated either.  Anti-semitic groups and individuals at times have tried to target the Talmud as something "evil," and its importance to the literary survival of the Jewish people has always been seen as a threat by their enemies, and hence the problem.  It is also similar to how anti-Catholic Protestant Fundamentalists like to accuse Catholics of "worshipping" the Church Fathers for the same reason, although in reality, the Talmud is more similar to the Catholic Code of Canon Law than it is to the Patristic writings.  So, rather than being a "threat" or "evil," the Talmud is basically just a written record of the centuries-long discourse of rabbis and other authorities debating how certain issues are to be addressed in lieu of Jewish tradition and what the Torah says.   There are also different collections of the Talmud as well, at least three if I am not mistaken, and each of them even differs from the others to some degree.  So, attacking the Talmud is an insufficient reason to be anti-semitic.

3.  The third argument is a bit of a gem, and it is so because there is actually some truth to it.  One individual on the discussion board of the particular social media group actually made the argument that someone who doesn't like Jews cannot be anti-semitic because Arabs are Semites too.  My question to that individual was "yes, so what is your point?"   Jews are indeed a Semitic people, and as such, they belong to a family of Semitic peoples that includes Arabs, Assyro-Chaldaeans, Syriacs, Lebanese Syro-Maronites, Amharic (and related peoples) of Ethiopia, and the natives of the island of Malta.  However, when this argument is used to justify hatred of Jews by saying the term "anti-semitism" is a bad term to use, it is important to remind that individual that the accepted term for anti-Jewish hatred is anti-semitism - the whole world as a consensus accepts that definition.  For a person to use that argument to justify their own bigotry is weak at best and just asserts that they will resort to a semantic argument to attempt to justify their own hatred.

4.  A fourth argument is one I am not hearing as much but it is still bandied about, and that is this - "well, today's Jews are not the same people as the ancient Israelites."  I have heard this one ad nauseum from even college professors, and in general, it entails a fallacy that most of today's Jews are actually Turks by race, as they are supposedly the descendants of a tribe called the Khazars.  The fallacy here is simple - DNA testing in modern times has pretty much established that Jews are a Semitic people, not Turks, and it also flies in the face of history as well.  The Khazars were a historical people, and at a certain point in their history they did adopt Judaism as their state religion, but there is no logical proof that every Jew in the world is somehow merely a Khazar.  As a matter of fact, evidence exists to the contrary - when the Khazar state fell in the 10th century, its rulers wanted to secure help from the neighboring Khwarezm kingdom which was Islamic - the Khwarez sultan refused to help them because they were "infidels," and thus the Khazars became Muslims in order to preserve their kingdom through a political alliance, a claim noted by a contemporary Islamic writer of the time by the name of Ibn al-Athir ("Khazars," at Wikipedia.com, updated 11 May 2019 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars - accessed 5/17/2019).  If that is the case, due to the geographic location of where the ancient Khazar kingdom was, it was highly possible that the majority of Khazars were assimilated into Turkish Muslim populations, and the more likely descendants of the Khazars may be some enclaves of Azeri Turks today rather than Jews.  Many scholars also reject the "Khazar theory" as well, based on recent advances in DNA research and other evidence, plus the association of the "Khazar theory" with anti-semitic groups of various persuasions.  Also, if we were even to entertain the notion that in some alternate reality the Khazars would not have been assimilated into another related Islamic Turkish group, but instead lived on as an independent entity with their Judaism intact, it is still not plausible that Jews would somehow all be Khazars today because the Jewish Diaspora predated the Khazars' adaptation of Judaism by centuries, and there were already viable Jewish communities all over Europe and in the Middle East prior to the Khazars.  That is another reason that argument falls flat.

5.  The final argument I wanted to debunk is one that some in the Church have been spewing for centuries, and it is fallacious on many levels.  This one is that because the Jews are somehow a "cursed people" for their rejection of Christ, it is therefore acceptable for Christians to hate and persecute them.  Often, those who espouse this crazy idea (which also flies in the face of clear teaching from the Gospels, I might add) often try to justify it by referencing the Church Fathers, who at times did speak harshly of Jews.  There are two things that totally blow this argument out of the water.  First, often those references are taken totally out of context - no Patristic writer or any other Church authority has ever said it was "acceptable" to hate and persecute Jews, not one.  On the contrary, often the harsh words of the Church Fathers are more chastizing of the Jews for rejecting Christ, which for many Church Fathers and other writers was actually beyond comprehension - their reasoning was that it was foolish for the Jews to reject a Messiah who was sent specifically to them first, and then kill Him, although they also acknowledge that the Atonement was necessary for all of humanity's salvation.  That Jews continued to reject Christ was to them baffling, and they didn't mince words saying so!  However, what many critics and people who use these quotes to justify their own anti-semitism on religious grounds, miss, is the rest of the story in context - if you read further in their writings, many Church Fathers actually prayed for Jews to be converted, and although harsh otherwise, they actually believed that Jews should be the logical ones to convert as their own traditions taught them that a Messiah from among them would be sent to them first, and that rejection of that truth was the ultimate foolish act.  As the Jewish convert to Catholicism, Roy Schoeman, writes in his book Salvation is From the Jews (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2003) on page 355, when a Jewish person does convert to the truth of the Christian faith, they often testify that they are far more Jewish after their conversion than before and that on a very fundamental level their thirst for God and His Truth is met in a way it would not have been outside Christianity.   Schoeman also notes on page 354 that Satan has often used "Christian" persecution of Jews as a way to make Jews who are targeted hostile to the Christian message, and that leads to the rise of people like Karl Marx - as noted in #1 above, the worst and most evil representations of people of Jewish heritage who are often used as an excuse to justify anti-semitism are often the result of people persecuting Jews earlier in the name of Christ, and thus a Jew on the receiving end of that gets a flawed witness of religious faith that often makes them hostile to religion.  So, the "Christian" anti-semite is actually more responsible for the people that Karl Marx was and George Soros is than the Jews themselves, so where is the real "conspiracy" then?  It is supposed and professed "Christians" creating monsters through their own hate, and Satan wins as a result in that battle.  We as a Christian people have much to account for in that regard, as much of the moral decay is not the result of some "Zionist conspiracy," but rather it is the result of the failure of the Church to do her mission.  When we stop scapegoating others and take responsibility for our own actions in that regard, it will lead to the freedom of the Holy Spirit to convict us and supernatural grace to do its work in us. 

In retrospect, when we look at the writings of both Catholic and Orthodox Fathers, visionaries, and theologians over the centuries, a common theme can be seen in regard to the Jews and eschatology - prior to the return of Christ, there is to be a conversion of the Jewish people to the truths of the Gospel.  Let's set up that scenario.

Desmond Birch, a phenomenal Catholic scholar, wrote a book some years back called Trial, Tribulation, and Triumph (Santa Barbara, CA:  Queenship, 1996).  This book is a pretty detailed encyclopedic work documenting references from Church Fathers and others in Catholic tradition over the centuries in regard to the end times, and many of them have detailed writings about the conversion of the Jews.  There is a time noted, for instance, that a "fullness of the Gentiles" will take place when Gentiles will no longer come into the Church, and many will actually apostatize from it - we have seen that since the Enlightenment, although in the past century it has accelerated somewhat.  The Scriptural premise for this is based on Romans 11:25-27, which has to do with the re-introduction of national Israel (the Jews) into spiritual Israel (the Church).  We see this also in Ephesians 3:6 as well, as it is called there "the In-Grafting."  There is to be an "Age of Peace" just prior to the Tribulation in which an overwhelming majority of national Israel (meaning the Jews) would be converted, and during this mass conversion of the Jews would be the "Great Apostasy" of the Gentiles, which we also see in Scripture in 2 Thessalonians 1-2 as well as in Matthew 24:10 and in I Timothy 4:1.  This Apostasy would be so great that it would be unprecedented in history up to that time, and if one looks at what is happening in Western civilization today, we see it - no need to go into the details, but just look at what dominates our news, social media, etc.  When this happens, according to St. Jerome and others, the time when Israel would be converted would come.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church also affirms this in CCC 674, and it specifically states there that the Second Coming of Christ will not happen until the conversion of "all Israel." (Birch, pp. 417-419).  Fr. Elias Friedman, in his 1987 book Jewish Identity (Ypsilanti, MI:  The Miriam Press, 1987), notes that the Apostle St. Paul revealed in the noted passage in Romans that the final destiny of post-Christic Jewry would be accession to the Christian faith (Friedman, p. 128), and he also notes on page 130 of his text St. John Chrysostom's Homily on the Epistle to the Romans, where the great saint actually says that as God notes the abuse of the grace He gave the Gentiles, He will recall the Jews a second time.  Fr. Friedman, later in his book, also concurs with the Orthodox ascetic Lev Gillet in the latter's book Communion in the Messiah, with the fact that Israel as a modern state is divinely ordered by Christ Himself as a major part of the plan of a future Jewish conversion - Gillet saw that happening in 1942 when he authored the book, six years before the modern nation of Israel was established, and Fr. Friedman saw in the experience of Israel a sharing in the nature of Christ Himself - the Holocaust, for instance, was a participation in the Passion, while the establishment of Israel was a sort of picture of the Resurrection (Friedman, p. 124), and the later conversion of Israel to the truth of Christ was in essence like a Second Coming.  Birch and Friedman, as well as Schoeman, also cite numerous references that God has not given up on the Jews yet - on the contrary, He wills to save the Jews and bring them into the fulness of His kingdom.  And, those references come from a pretty broad cross-section of Church Fathers, saints, Popes, and even contemporary theologians of the past 500 years or so.  There are likewise Orthodox Fathers and saints who have stated the same - a small book published by Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY, entitled  Apostasy and Antichrist includes a number of references from Orthodox Fathers and theologians pretty much stating the same idea as the Catholic references one finds in Birch's and Friedman's books.  I, unfortunately, don't have that small 47-page booklet handy at this point, as it is packed away in a box in my office, but it is worth reading for sure. 

Now, it may be asked how this is compatible with political Zionism?  Honestly, I have serious problems with my own with so-called "Christian Zionism," in that it may be more anti-semitic than it is in support of the Jewish people.  It also does a serious disservice to indigenous Christians of the region as well, and that cannot be tolerated.  Hearing blow-hards on "religious television" such as John Hagee basically saying the Jews are somehow "exempt" from salvation is a heresy, as Jesus died for all humanity, Jew and Gentile included.  Also, in their pursuit of "Christian Zionism," often Evangelicals who embrace that idea throw evangelization of the Jewish people out the window in deference to some political ideology.  It is one reason why I do believe Israel has a right to exist as a nation, and I even believe it is divinely-mandated as a way to disseminate the Gospel to the Jewish people to bring about their conversion, but at the same time I do not support the "Christian Zionist" agenda which often makes Israel look "perfect" when at times its government does make mistakes - not everything Israel does is perfect, as they are still fallible human beings like us all and are capable of bad judgments, and where they do so, it should be addressed truthfully.  Since my own conversion to the Catholic Church and my deliverance from the ideology of "Christian Zionism," my own views on the whole Israel/Palestinian issue have gotten more complicated and it has taken some time to sort them out.  That is one reason why in recent years I think one of the best movies that accurately illustrates what we should be striving for is the Adam Sandler film You Don't Mess With the Zohan. The movie, which entails a super-powerful Israeli spy named Zohan and his nemesis, an equally-powerful Palestinian terrorist called the Phantom, has as its premise how pointless and futile war is, and in the end Zohan ends up actually mending fences with Phantom and marrying his sister, whom he'd briefly worked for as a hairdresser in New York.  Now, the movie is somewhat off-color, as there are some rather raunchy scenes in it, but like most of Sandler's films over the years, once you get past the off-base humor there is actually a good moral underneath it.  And, the moral is this - in the end, we are all still humans despite our differences, which increasingly become more superficial.  And, as humans from a Catholic perspective, we are all deeply in need of salvation and God's grace, both of which he has provided in his Son, Jesus Christ.  And, that leads to my last point.

Anti-semitism, or any other nationalist, ethic, or racially-based hatred and prejudice, is not a Christian virtue.  Therefore, I have a warning for you "Christian" anti-semites out there today, especially if you profess to be Catholic.  Many of those to whom this is directed pride themselves in being "traditionalists:"  they prefer the Latin Mass, rail against anything that smacks of "modernism," and they yearn for the Catholic faith to be restored.  Nothing wrong with any of that in the proper context, but here's the thing - many of these people who decry modernism and other ills they perceive in society have themselves a deficiency of supernatural grace in their own lives.  They are often more concerned with how their fellow communicants receive the Eucharist at Mass (the debate is whether it should be received in the hand or on the tongue, or if it should be received standing or kneeling) than they are with the transformation of their own hearts.   They do all the right things outside but lack inner conversion.  It is often these individuals who are anti-semitic and racist in their attitudes, and many of us who are Traditionalists call them "MadTrads" because they are often obnoxious, self-righteous, prideful, and just unpleasant people.  Those individuals, instead of railing against the Novus Ordo Mass or how the person in the pew in front of them receives Communion, should be paying a visit to the confessional or spending more time studying Scripture and praying, as they have an attitude problem that may imperil their salvation.  They are as much an instrument of Satan, honestly, as the Modernist who tries to advance the LGBT agenda and other junk.  Apostasy comes in a variety of forms, and we should be careful to not be seduced by the siren song of one of those forms.  "MadTrads" without a conversion of heart who spout anti-semitic conspiracy theories are just as evil as James Martin, the "Rainbow Jesuit" who is pushing for "gay marriage" in the Church - both of them represent the worst in concupiscent nature, and both need to have a conversion of heart.  That is what prompted this article today, and more could be said but I have to stop somewhere.  Hopefully, those to whom this is directed will allow the Holy Spirit to use it to work in them to bring repentance, and then we all should pray for the conversion also of our Jewish neighbors, with all the charity Christ commands us to have.  Thanks again for allowing me to share, and will see you next time.