http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=36797
Ponder this story for a moment, if you will.
There has been throughout history a certain recurrence of war between life itself and death, and it is chiefly represented in the battle over the family and the child. It is also the battle of each Person of that Sacred Trinity which the Christian holds dear.
The first was the Battle of the Father and Moloch, a dance of death fought from Jerusalem and Tyre in the East to Rome and Carthage in the West. It is the war of a wroth Father God to preserve His own people against the mad gods who desired nothing less than to devour them through their children. It was a war echoed in the hearts of Rome, and more importantly in the hearths of Rome. For while the Romans knew not the Father God of the Hebrews, they did at least make fatherhood and family into gods, gods greater than the others of their varied pantheon. And it was this divinity of the family that refused all surrender and all peace with Carthage, the city of the slaughtered innocents.
And in that Roman struggle, as in the Hebrew struggle before it, we see something amazing. That as each of these disparate tribes was conquered, they conquered the conqueror; as each tribes hope's were consumed, each tribe brought an end to a darker hope. That the Hebrews, though broken by Egypt, yet escaped and conquered Palestine. That when broken by Assyria and Babylon, they were yet freed by Persia, and fought all the empires that sought to tame them. But even more it was Rome, Rome the Mighty who we find prostrate but unrepentant at the feet of Carthage. At the feet of Hannibal, grace of Baal. And though crushed, though defeated, though hopeless, Rome was still the army of life, still the guardian of the family, and would never make peace with death. From ruinous defeats untold throughout Italy, Rome triumphed, life conquered, even as it was about to die, it conquered finally, and fantastically. It left no stone standing of Carthage, salted its grounds and burned its fields, and put to the sword the works of Moloch.
Thus ended the first battle between God and the Demons, as Chesterton calls them in th Everlasting Man.
The second comes in the Battle of the Son and Ha-satanna. Again Rome and Jerusalem are the focal points of history, and again, the battle between life and death found its root horror in the slaughter of innocents. For the coming of the Jewish Messiah and the Christian God was presaged by the butchering of hundreds of children throughout Palestine by King Herod "the Great." Again at the pivotal time of history, infanticide found its expression in the ancient war of life and death, and this battle would find its climax not at the walls of death, but instead at the gates of Sheol and on the lonely plain of Calvary. For again did the forces of life struggle against death, and like in the first, life was conquered, life was vanquished. And like in the earlier wars of life and death, but surpassing even them, was life truly killed. For Rome was never beaten to death in that it always lived. It was conquered, but not vanquished. And the Jews may have been brought to bondage numerous times, but there always remained Jews to be bound. But on the day when the world turned black, and Jesus the Christ hung on a cross, life was not merely beaten down or bonded, life was ended. Christ died, death won, the slaughter of innocents that began 33 years earlier culminated in one final, and one even more grave slaughter. The slaughter of a man no longer an infant, and yet still innocent.
But the battle did not end. For Christ, though dead, again lived. The Crucifixion was the triumph of death over life, but it was the Resurrection that was the triumph of Life over Death, and in it death was destroyed more completely than ever Carthage was wiped from the Earth. And wherever Christ's banner, the banner of His death, the banner of the Crucifix went, death was toppled. From the Thuggie cult of India, to the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, Christ conquered all such dread terrors.
And following Christ, who rose to Heaven to join His Father, we had sent to us a Guide, the Spirit of Truth, the very Spirit of the Life we adore.
And now it is the Spirit's war, and it is a war which has escalated. For so were the innocents slaughtered by the hundreds in Carthage, and the thousands by Herod, now they are butchered by the millions. And while before they were sacrificed for some dark purpose, for some unthinkable objective that had to be purchased in human blood, now it has become even less and so even worse. It is the unwillingness of the world to be responsible for itself. It is the final assault on this God of Fatherhood, of this familial deity, of this the God of Father, Son, and Spirit. This is the final rebellion, this is the final war, and we are in the pinnacle battle. And while before the dark purpose of this sacrifice was to invoke demons against gods, or the Demon against the God, now this final sacrifice is of Men battling God, and it will indeed be the last struggle, for there is none left to challenge life. But who shall stand for it? Rome and Jerusalem stood in their times, but now they are failing. Christ on the Cross stands eternally, but what if none shall follow? The death that entered the world through sin was defeated by Christ, but if we elect to reject Christ, if we war with life itself, then death will be our victory and our defeat.
It will be, if you can forgive the pun, the ultimate in Pyhrric victories.
God the Father and God the Son have waged this war, and planted the first and most important victories in human soil and in human hearts. The first victory ensured that the past was not horrific, and that the future could be bright. The second ensured that so long as man followed God, life would never wane. The third victory, the final victory, is the one that God will fight in us, as God once fought through Jerusalem and Rome. And this time it will not be the wrath of the Father, but the inspiration of the Spirit that will guide us. This is the war to end all wars, the chance to rebuild that which has decayed, and defend that which is defenseless.
But from where shall the battle be waged? For both Rome and Jerusalem are besieged, and even now are falling. Rome's soul is burning, and Jerusalem's is divided. The West is immolated in its own self-destructive tendencies, for the West has come full circle back to Carthage, full circle back to Moloch. This is the last struggle of a long dead god, who has found one last arm to stretch out and bring death to others. For just as Carthage's own obsession with the practical darkness, with the material and commercial worlds, with its own practical endeavors wrought its final downfall, even as it stood, foot on the throat of Rome, so too shall our civilization fall. We shall fall to decadence, we shall fall to practicality, we shall fall to Moloch, who has devoured our children. We have given up our families to the idol not of gold or bronze, not worked in strange or terrible faces, but to the idol of glass, the idol of the mirror, the idol of humanity, worked in our own face, and our own image, which is the most frightening of all. We have become the premier cannibals, the connoisseurs of evil more repugnant than any that has gone before it. Humanity has become the idol to which we sacrifice our young, and we no longer do it with even any pretext to purpose, but out of mere inconvenience, and we have no further to look for the most horrific demonstration of the Truth of Christianity's doctrine of Original Sin than to see what humanity has become left to itself after too much secularism.
Man and God now war, the Spirit of Life with the Man of Death. And the Spirit shall win, and the Final Day shall come, and all we have wrought will be shadows and dust, and the long arm of Moloch will fall. And with it shall fall the West, where once the hope of Mankind lay.
Christians, what is there for us? Our society has become the veritable culture of death, and we stand in the midst of battle. And even as we speak, as you read, as I write, our world is battering down all others. We are destroying Africa, we are laying waste to Asia, just as we have laid waste to Europe and North America. China has become so a part of our modern Moloch, that they are not even cannibalizing their society just in figure of speech, but in literal action. Africa too is reeling under the hammer strokes of the secular world's solutions, that of the common choice to end the future of humanity. As Europe is dying, so Africa will die, left to this course. As we have slaughtered, so China is slaughtering.
We have come to the final battle, to the world at war, to the last stand.
So stand! Stand and fight and go not quiet into that long night. For life and love and light themselves are what we have at stake. And the only path we have to walk is that of battle.
These priests, they are fighting, and they are winning. And just so, we see the very demons who demanded the deaths of our most innocent and beloved throughout human history making their presence known in the horrific and blasphemous assaults upon their faith and character. If any doubts that this is a war between demons and the Spirit of God, reread this article, go see for yourself the trenches of this war, and then start praying.
