The Great Deception: How the West Was Lost, and How to Win It Back

Let us imagine that we had a new pope tomorrow morning who wrote an encyclical addressed to all the faithful in which he listed the complete dogmatic and moral teaching of the Church. Nobody could doubt any longer what is the truth and what has been the falsehood into which we have been led in the past.

Let us imagine that this encyclical was ordered to be read in every parish in the world and was to become the set syllabus for every Catholic school in Christendom. Would this completely solve the contemporary crisis in the Church? The answer is no. Why?  Because since Pope Pius XI, in whose pontificate I was born, popes (but sadly not all) have defended the traditional dogmatic and moral teaching of the Church, but none of them have taken the next and vital step: to instruct and detail how we go about receiving this all-powerful love of God called the Holy Spirit.

When I was growing up before the Second Vatican Council, Catholics were seen as a group of guilt-ridden hypocrites. In other words, they might well know what they believe and how they should behave, but they do not do it. That is why they have to keep dashing off to confession every week before going to Mass. This might be a caricature, but like all caricatures it helps the less observant to see what might otherwise have escaped their attention. And that is that unlike the first Christians and their faithful descendants in later centuries who were inspired by the same Holy Spirit who animated Our Lord during His life on earth, they were not sufficiently open to receive God’s Holy Spirit, so their faith remained superficial if not merely nominal.  

It is one thing to endlessly condemn the anthropomorphic heresies of Modernism—and feel a certain self-satisfaction in so doing. But that will achieve nothing without simultaneously teaching and detailing the theocentric spirituality of Catholicism. The question is: What must we do to receive God’s love so that one day we can say with St. Paul, “I live, no it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Then we will not only experientially know the living God and what He wants us to do but we will have received and continued to receive His Love to enable us to do it. We all know that Christ is Risen and that the love that the Father wants to give us through Him comes to us through the sacraments, most particularly through the Sacrificial Sacrament of the Mass. But what do we have to do in order to receive it?

Shortly before the contemporary crisis that we all now know has almost reached its nadir, Pope Benedict was inspired to answer this question not from His own teaching but through the teaching of a great medieval mystic whom he proposed to canonize. He died before he could personally canonize her, but his successor rubber-stamped his work and she was canonized in 2013. St. Angela of Foligno was a wife and a mother as well as a great mystic, so she is someone to whom we can all look for guidance on this $75,000 question. What must we do to prepare ourselves to receive God’s infinite loving that is always being poured out for us through Jesus Christ, our King? 

Following the same teaching of Christ Himself, she said that the “one thing necessary” to receive this love is to go into what she calls the “Schola Divini Amoris,” the “School of Divine Love,” because this is the only place where human loving learns how to receive Divine Loving. Let me explain precisely what this means. The first thing Jesus told His listeners to do when He began to preach was to keep turning to love God throughout their daily lives, despite the temptations that kept drawing their attention elsewhere. In the Aramaic language in which Jesus preached, this continual turning back to God was called repenting. In essence, each act of repentance was, in effect, an act of love.

The more often a person performed such acts of love, the more it would open them to receive God’s love in return. This is the only love that would, as Jesus promised, eventually lead them to love others as He did—and then, eventually, to be united with God. Continually repenting or continually making acts of love is, therefore, of utmost importance, for it is the most important thing that any human being can learn in order to receive God’s love in return. That is why to speed up the process of learning how to love God, Our Lord taught people that, like Him, they should go to what St. Angela of Foligno called the School of Divine Love, to do and to do regularly and at speed precisely what Christ had understandably called “the one thing necessary.”

When we set aside some daily time to do “the one thing necessary,” we use vocal prayers, meditation, adoration, or contemplation to keep our attention fixed on God. I have written and spoken at length about these different forms of prayer elsewhere, so here I want to concentrate on something that happens to everyone when they go to pray—as it happened to Our Lord Himself—that will help us to understand what is, in fact, the very essence of prayer. I am referring to the hundred and one distractions and temptations that make so many people think that they cannot pray.

According to St. Teresa of Avila, we cannot pray without them; and, short of some sort of divine ecstasy, we will always have them. We cannot pray without them because each time we try to turn away from them in order to turn back to God, we have, in fact, made an act of repentance or an act of love. If, therefore, in the quarter of an hour or so that we have chosen to give to God in prayer we have a hundred distractions or temptations, it means we have made a hundred acts of love.

Vices are bad habits formed by continually performing evil actions; virtues are good habits formed by continually performing good actions. The human virtue of trying to love God can only be formed by continually trying to love Him. This is, of course, easy in sweetness and light; but our perseverance in darkness and aridity is far more meritorious and, therefore, far more effective when practiced in what St. Angela calls the School of Divine Love.

It is essential to realize that whenever we try to raise our hearts and minds to God in this School—most especially in darkness and aridity—then, in the very act of trying to do this, our free will is actively choosing to open our hearts to God, so God can, and always does, respond in kind. But, of course, His kind of love infinitely surpasses our kind of love. Nevertheless, because we pray within and together with His Son, Our Lord, His hypostatic and glorified body enables us to receive our Father’s love through Him. This love then begins the work of transforming our weak human love into a new hybrid form of loving in which our loving is so united with Christ’s loving that it can continually rise to receive the love of His Father in return.

St. Thomas Aquinas explains why, or rather how, God’s love, what the Fathers of the Church call the Pleroma, then begins to remake and reform us into His own image and likeness that can be seen to perfection in human form in Jesus Christ, Our Lord. With the required patience and perseverance in performing acts of love, a habit of loving is gradually formed that creates an inner disposition of heart and mind that enables God to lead us into contemplation, where we then begin to receive the fruits of contemplation.

St. Thomas Aquinas calls these fruits the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit. That is why he insisted that our calling—our vocation in Christ—is to contemplate and to share the fruits of our contemplation with others. Without the infused theological virtues of love, faith, and hope, and without the infused cardinal virtues of wisdom, goodness, self-control, and fortitude, not to mention more than sixty infused moral virtues, we could never imitate Christ in whom all these infused virtues were perfectly exemplified.

That is why, on the first Pentecost Day, the same infinite life and love of the Holy Trinity who animated Christ when He was on earth is sent out in the form of the Holy Spirit—whose love alone can recreate us in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. Just as all the colors of the spectrum are contained within a single shaft of light, as Sir Issac Newton discovered by passing light through a prism, so, also, are all the infused virtues—and all the fruits and all the supernatural gifts—contained within the love of the Holy Spirit.

The prayer, then, that you might have long since given up because you experienced nothing, and the distractions and temptations that made you think that prayer was impossible anyway, is, in fact, the way—and the only way—to your salvation, redemption, transformation, transfiguration, and glorification. There is no other way unless you believe in magic. Mere presence at the Mass, for instance, no matter how well it might be celebrated, without the sacrificial loving learned before you entered the Church that you then unite with Christ’s sacrificial loving, is to believe in magic. God only responds to love, not magic.

All too many, and for all too long, have been deceived by the greatest deceiver of all. Knowing well enough that what has just been said is the key to salvation, sanctification, and what the Geek fathers called divinization, his whole power is galvanized to turn you back and away from prayer the very moment you try to make a start.

So, in the future when you go to pray, realize from the very beginning what is going on. You are going into the trenches to take up arms against the devil. All the distractions and temptations that will immediately assail you come from the world that you have just left, over which he presides, or from the underworld within you, where he has corrupted the God-given desires and urges that were given to make us into perfect human beings at one with ourselves, at one with each other, and at one with God. Go into prayer, then, as if you are going into battle—because that is the truth of the matter. But nevertheless realize that each time you turn way from each distraction or temptation, you are simultaneously turning to receive the life-giving power of God.

Nor must you let the coward in you have its way, inducing you to run away because you cannot face the truth. The truth is that for so long you have been doing your own will most of the time, so when you are suddenly asked to do God’s will instead, by making repeated acts of love, it can be not just difficult but extremely tiring too. One of the most successful stratagems of the Deceiver is to keep you so busy that you are always tired—so the very thought of prayer where you have to tirelessly fight against evil makes you turn to human palliatives instead.

The so-called “Contemplation in Action” that is supposed to make us into “mystics in the marketplace” is a paradoxical nonentity—and one of the Deceivers most successful ways of keeping the overworked and the spiritually undernourished away from true contemplation as defined and explained by St. Thomas Aquinas. And so are the emotions that are generated in what the new renaissance congregations call “Acquired Contemplation.” St. Thomas must turn in his grave to see their anthropocentric spiritualities and their ignorance of true mystical contemplation that he once taught was the heart and soul not just of the religious life but of the Christian life.

In the battle for supremacy during the Enlightenment the new congregations were victorious, and true contemplation gradually disappeared from sight, even among the older orders’ and so, therefore, did its fruits, without which we are spiritually helpless, as our present plight should make abundantly clear. The victory of the anthropomorphic, activity-centered congregations, when psychology took the place of spirituality, was finally swallowed up in the victory of “Liberation Theology,” now called globalism, that Rome now seeks to serve through synodality.

Nevertheless, for the few who patiently press on in prayer, come hell or high water, their perseverance will finally do to death the cupboard love in us, enabling God to see the purity of our intention that will always induce Him to lead us onward, from wherever we start, into contemplation. Here we will receive what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation to which I have already referred.

For the first Christians, the sacrifices that they made, and made daily, to do “the one thing necessary” were taken with them each Sunday, so that they could unite them with the Sacrifice of Christ, their King, to receive Holy Communion. Whether received physically or spiritually, hopefully both, it is here that the inner spiritual power and strength is received to continually and patiently press on, patiently persevering in the prayer through which alone God’s Divine Plan for us can be ultimately brought to perfection. This plan is that what is received in prayer will overflow through us into and onto the world that Christ now wants to redeem through us, while simultaneously uniting us with ever greater depth and fullness with the Holy Trinity (John 14:23-24). 

By faithfully following the ever reoccurring daily mystical dynamic that I have just explained, we are gradually transformed into Christ. In other words, this is how we imitate the way Christ lived on earth, so that gradually our minds begin to be one with His, our heartbeat begins to synchronize with His, and our contemplation is united with His so that the same Holy Spirit who animated everything that He said and did on earth can do the same in us. That is why after His own glorification, as promised, He sent the same Holy Spirit to do in us what had been done in Him while He was on earth, so that we could receive the same fruits of contemplation that He Himself received, making all things possible that are quite impossible without it (John 14:12).

Beginning again means making a daily sacrifice to give to God something far more precious than your money or your property: your time. Now I hope it can be seen clearly and simply why Our Lord preached repentance, prayer, and sacrifice—and why this was the same message taught by the great saints and mystics in subsequent centuries. When during the first World War the world was in a state of moral and social decline and there was nothing to stop things getting worse, as they have done, Our Lady appeared at Fatima to repeat the same message that her Son had taught, in a desperate attempt to prevent us from degenerating any further into moral depravity. Her message was once again that we should repent, pray, and sacrifice. Now I hope it can be seen that these simple words sum up the very essence of the spiritual life and the prayer that is its heart and soul.

All that I have said about these three simple words will be seen more deeply by all who seriously try to put them into practice. As St. Thomas said, you will receive the infused virtue of wisdom whether you are a Nobel Prize winner or one who, to the worldly wise, appears as an illiterate nobody, like that semi-illiterate beggar from Italy whom we now call St. Francis of Assisi.

When it seemed nobody was taking her seriously, despite a world-shaking miracle, Our Lady “dictated” a letter to one of the visionaries to be opened in 1960 by the pope. Once again, it was the same message. She wanted him to call the universal Church to repent, pray, and sacrifice. But this time the letter detailed cataclysmic consequences involving serious betrayal of the Faith and morals perpetrated by leading members of the hierarchy if her message was once again ignored.

As we all know, it was ignored and a Council was called instead. The message clearly came from Christ Himself. You do not need to be a Scripture scholar to know that it was Christ’s message from the beginning; and today Our Lady is His beloved messenger. Christ had long since said that “He who rejects me rejects Him who sent me” (Luke 10:16), so the shameful and mindless rejection and the effrontery that this involves cannot be exaggerated, for it was given to God Himself.

If only a council had been called for, say, 1965. The universal call to repent, pray, and sacrifice in 1960, with all that this entails, would ensure the unequivocal success of this Council at the very moment when “Modernism gone mad” was about to destroy the Church from within. It would not only be supported by the universal prayers and sacrifices of the whole of the Catholic Church for five years, but it would mean something further. It would mean that large numbers, if not all of the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, with their advisers, would come to the Council inspired and ready to be guided by the Holy Spirit—and by what St. Thomas Aquinas called His infused virtues, and His supernatural gifts, and, of course, pre-eminently, with the infused virtues of wisdom, goodness, prudence, and, finally, fortitude. They would have put into practice the truth of the Gospel in a modern world that was, even then, busily employed in reshaping that world in their own image and likeness and for their own libertarian well-being and satisfaction.

If only Our Lady had been listened to, the Holy Father would be able to summarize how the Gospel had once again been restated and had been “prudently” applied to the modern world with the same words used by St. Peter after the council of Jerusalem: “It seems good to us and to the Holy Spirit” (Acts 15:28).

However, this unfortunately did not happen, and the downward graph toward “Modernism gone manic” that began at the Renaissance took a frightening dip downward after the Council toward the devilry that now resides in both the world and the Church, that all with eyes purified by infused wisdom can see.

What then of the future? This will have to wait until the next essay as I have run out of time!