I recently had the misfortune to witness a middle-schooler, in public, playing a game on a VR headset, punching at the air and talking about all the blood coming out of the imaginary character he was fighting, and then he started making sexual motions with whatever was left of the imaginary bloody character. This spectacle went on for too long. It dawned on me that we don’t even have to pretend there are invisible demons any longer, people are openly engaging with them. Honestly, watching this kid on the VR headset made me want to call for the nearest exorcist and psychiatrist, although I would guess only the former could truly help.

The world is starving for authenticity. Everything we see on a screen is paper thin. Everything we see in virtual reality is vaporware. A maddening search is happening today for authenticity and the witness of the next Agnes is coming who will jolt many from their slumber and others will attack the authenticity. Those who God calls, hear his voice, and he does indeed call his sheep in mysterious ways.

Already in schools we hear from kids coming home that are being bullied for not being open enough to sex, or ideas about sex. Chastity, and the goal of chastity, is the sin of our age. The occurrences and teachings happening at American schools everywhere would make the Romans at an orgy do a double-take.

While this may seem a tragedy, this may actually be a good sign. It may actually be part of the great comedy, because, as you know, comedy ends in a marriage, and only tragedy ends in death. The marriage of heaven and earth is guaranteed to follow a trial before the passing of this world happens, and all is God’s will. The victory is already won.

(Quick reminder: God is outside of time and space. Only we are within it. Our job is to cooperate with God’s grace that is freely offered. We can reject it, too. The Catechism of the Catholic Church covers all of this. It is truly essential reading, so much that if I am ever exiled to a desert island, I will take three books with me. The Bible, The Catechism, and The Imitation of Christ. If I get a fourth book, Moby Dick, since it is inscrutable and I’d be in a sea setting.)

We are guaranteed a wild fourth quarter before the final buzzer sounds. Whatever you do, do not follow the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd is a myth. Sure, it’s a good title for a book, but Jesus said the opposite when he said that wide is the road that leads to destruction, and the gate is narrow that leads to eternal life. Agnes found the narrow gate.

So whatever is in store for the years ahead, be like Agnes. Be like Mary. Don’t fall for the coming AI bot or VR headset. The great religious deception will claim billons, but, spoiler, God wins in the end. As always, in the end, God gets the victory and the glory. Like all romantic comedies, this all ends in a wedding, because he loves us.

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

…

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world. (CCC 675-677)

Cosmic upheaval? Brace yourself. Find a rock to hold onto.

This world is passing, but before it does we will see more saints like Agnes.

We have reached the final end of this era, where unless you are fully committed to unchastity, you are evil. The inversion is made but like a buoy, the right-side-up will bob back into view once we stop trying to drown that which forever floats and can never be sunk.

We’ve gone all the way down now, which means the only way left is to go up, just as Dante shows us so well in the Divine Comedy. From John Wycliffe to Machiavelli to Rene Descartes to Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx to Michel Foucault to Richard Dawkins to Steve Jobs to the currently trendy Yuval Harari: with all these intellectuals shoving God off-stage, we have reached full selfie-mode and the final stage of “my truth,” which is the descendent of the twin killers of faith called sola scriptura and pure reason.

Getting rid of God did not produce the glorious society, it did not free us from sin, and it did not disprove any Catholic teaching. The Pollyanna ideas of Steven Pinker and Yuval Harari will be as historically comical as the certainty of Hegel’s, Marx’s, and Fukuyama’s claims about “The end of history.”

Rest assured, in case anyone wonders: history as we know it, in time and space on this planet, will be over when Jesus returns. Not before. Not after. For those with concerns about being “on the right side of history,” the right side is that of Agnes and Mary, and Philomena, and Perpetua and Felicity, and all of the other teenage girls who changed the world in the name of Jesus Christ, son of the living God.

After all of the attacks and misinformation and corruption and abuse, the truth of Christ still stands, and will forever stand. And so does the Church. It stands on the triple foundation of Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium’s authority. We were taught that all the wars of the past were over religion, but then the twentieth century happened with religion nowhere in sight, which gives us great opportunity to review what we were taught about things like the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War as well. What we learn if we look back, and look hard, is that these were wars of nationalism, of kings and mercenaries, not unlike the World Wars, which were over resources and power. All wars are unlike Christ, but we tell ourselves fibs to blame religion, when it is always powerful and prideful leaders, who may or may not use people’s faith as a tool, to wage wars. The reality is this: religion in Europe and America has been placed under the state for a long time. Even Luther and Calvin traded their budding churches for state protection, and both found early on that to protect their ideas, the sword was needed in carrying forward their interpretations. Once they and so many others took up their personal vocation to be Popes, they then found that putting the toothpaste back in the tube could not be done when the peasant revolts started, because the peasants realized that they also had a vocation and calling to be a Pope. Everyone became a Pope.

Everyone became the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, thus it was no longer sacred. The claim of “My truth” today is how we all crown ourselves Pope. We all want to be King and Pope, and in rejecting the Pope, the Reformation crowned Kings, who hired biased interpreters to argue and sew their desires onto the word of God.

Eventually we all became kings of our own flat, secular lives. “Whose realm, their religion" is a phrase that came out of the 1500s when kings were hammering scripture to fit their needs, and it wasn’t just Henry VIII, it was every realm that realized they could act like Jack in Lord of the Flies and invent their own religion. I have written about this ad nauseam in two long series, one about Abraham and Uranus and one about the Tower of Babel. None of this rejection of God is new.

What is always new is Agnes. The rejection of the rejection of God always stuns us, because we forget that we can say “Yes” to God.

Rejection is the oldest cliche in history. It’s boring. Sin makes you stupid. It always needs a new name. We just pretend every generation that it’s new, but it’s trite and lame. Thinkers like Descartes (or Dawkins, or Harari, et al), they are not doing anything particularly deep, even though we pretend they are. They are just bad ideas with modern jargon that resurrect the moon god religions of old. They expand and expound the moon god with more words, a thousand fold more, all to reduce the authority of God. All they want, really, is to take up the mantle of God, but they can’t. (Sorry creatures: you are created. I know it hurts to hear it.)

So rebellion seems original but it’s like watching re-runs. It’s boring. Every power grab in history is the same, as it is universally a rejection of God and neighbor. When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he declared “thinking” to be the first principle, which is precisely the fall in the Garden of Eden as the devil places a thought into Eve’s head that she will be like God, and then Adam follows along (and then blames her). The reason Mary’s Fiat, her “Yes” to God is such a big deal, is because it reverse Eve’s “No”. This is why we call Mary the “Undoer of Knots”.

No, Mr. Descartes: thinking is not the first principal of all things. Being itself, a.k.a. God Most High, is the creator. Descartes’ great mistake was to assume that thoughts come from us and are not put there, and he managed to strip away everything but his mind, and in excessive thinking, he became a mouthpiece of the one (hint: it’s the devil) who forever tries to tell us that the soul does not matter, or…or at the very most, if the soul exists at all, is disconnected from the body.

Descartes was an amputee, too. I can relate. Through a long series of academic arguments, I amputated my soul using the methods of Descartes, and so have many others today. But it bears repeating: the good news is that the soul didn’t go anywhere. It’s still linked with the body. In fact, it’s inseparable in the long run. We just “think” it’s been amputated, just as we “think” the devil doesn’t exist, and “think” that God doesn’t exist, or “think” that God isn’t a living God who knows the number of hairs on our heads.

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