Abbey-Roads2

What does annihilation mean? 

Being the 90th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima, one cannot help but ponder the Blessed Virgin’s warnings to us if her requests went unheeded.  She said: “If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.”    Well, the good are martyred, the Holy Father has suffered, now what nations are on their way out?

For the past few years I have wondered if the part, “various nations will be annihilated” may not refer to the effects of contraception and abortion rather than some sort of nuclear war or cataclysmic event.  Considering that native Europeans are fast becoming a minority in Europe due to low rates of reproduction and the influx of Islamic immigrants, this may not be such an “off the wall” theory.

Fr. George Welzbacher, a retired professor of History at the University of St. Thomas, currently pastor for the Church of St. John in St. Paul’s East Side, composes excellent “Pastor’s Pages” for his weekly bulletin.  This past Sunday he comments on the subject of Europe’s decline, reprinting a review of a  book dealing with the prospect of an Islamic Europe; The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.  By Walter Laqueur.  The review is good, but Fr. Welzbacher’s introduction to the article is also very good.  Presented here is an excerpt:

  Joining the chorus of the those rejecting Humanae Vitae were far too many Catholic priests and nuns and even here and there a bishop, rallying behind, in the USA, such theological mediocrities as Father Charles Curran or that vicious promoter of abortion “rights”, Father Robert Drinan, S.J., the Pied Piper of Congress, who led many legislators who like to think of themselves as Catholic into voting for immoral laws. These enemies from within, having persuaded legions of the laity to defy the solemn teaching of Christ’s Vicar on earth, became in effect the heralds of a New Reformation, one in which ungovemed appetite has jettisoned by now the entire supernatural order and much of the natural order, too, a Reformation so radical that it would have appalled Martin Luther.

Judged by the multitude of their adherents the enemies of Humanae Vitae have prevailed. Contraception in the West has almost become the norm.  But as always happens in the end, though sometimes it takes a while to reach its term, when we revolt against the order established by God, we evoke catastrophe. And so today, forty years after Humanae Vitae, Western Europe-and Russia and Japan-are dying. - Fr. Welzbacher  

Fr. Welzbacher is a highly respected historian and dear friend of Fr. John  Zuhlsdorf.  This week’s Pastor’s Page concludes with this thought:

   “To punish our sins God doesn’t usually need to intervene. He just lets us pull the roof down on our own heads. Forty years after Humanae Vitae even many secularists are beginning to wonder if maybe Paul the Sixth wasn’t right.” - Fr. George Welzbacher

Feast of St. Teresa of Avila.

Today is the feast of my favorite saint - and I had no access to this blog to do a post on her.  So I am reminding everyone that I continue to post at Abbey-Roads 1  when I do not have access to Abbey 2.  Well, that is not exactly true - I post at Abbey 1  every day anyway.  (Make sure Abbey 1 is in your blogroll if you enjoy reading this blog.)

Now it is already 2nd Vespers of the feast of Holy Mother St. Teresa, and what can I say about her that hasn’t been said already today?  If you read this blog, you know I write about her a lot.  Teresa of Avila is especially dear to me because it took her so long to become a person of prayer.  She writes:

“Very often, for some years, I was more anxious that the hour I had determined to spend in prayer be over than I was to remain there… and so unbearable was the sadness I felt on entering the oratory, that I had to muster up all my courage.” - Life 8, 7 

After determining to practice prayer faithfully, St. Teresa continued to encounter problems:

“For more than eighteen of the twenty-eight years since I began prayer, I suffered this battle and conflict between friendship with God and friendship with the world.” - Life 8, 3

Many, many people who desire to make mental prayer a part of their life encounter the same difficulties as St. Teresa did.  Perfection doesn’t happen in a night, as Holy Mother’s life demonstrates, while her example and teaching encourages and leads anyone interested on the pathways of prayer.  Teresa struggled for twenty years!  She writes:

“I voyaged on this tempestuous sea for almost twenty years with these fallings and risings and this evil - since I fell again - and in a life so beneath perfection that I paid almost no attention to venial sins.  And mortal sins, although I feared them, I did not fear them as I should have since I did not turn away from the dangers.  I should say it is one of the most painful lives, I think, that one can imagine, for neither did I enjoy God nor did I find happiness in the world.  When I was experiencing the enjoyments of the world, I felt sorrow when I recalled what I owed to God.  When I was with God, my attachments to the world disturbed me.  This is a war so troublesome that I don’t know how I was able to suffer it even a month, much less for so many years.” - Life 8, 2

It is almost amusing to realize that what St. Teresa describes above is something a few people seem to  mistake for the ”dark night” of the spirit.  Not.