Aborting Souls

What they couldn’t kill in the womb they will pervert in the home

(Posted 7/31/09 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) Editor, The Remnant: Just a question (and please don’t take offence) but are the children you talk about in your Virtual Catacombs (See April 15, 2009 Remnant) real children or virtual children? And, if they are real, are they pre-teens or teens? I’m just curious to find out how they feel about your anti-modernist regime. Secondly, do you see any irony in the fact that you are using modern technology to produce what is arguably the best Catholic website going, one which is now read around the globe, and yet you are urging an Amish-like policy with regard to technology in the home?

Gerard McManus

P.S. We very much like Remnant in Australia

Editor’s Response: Many thanks, Mr. McManus, for your interest and for your support of The Remnant. No offense taken, I assure you! Yes, my children are real. They range in ages from two and thirteen, and thus far have managed (Deo Gratias!) to retain a healthy aversion for what passes for normal these days, i.e., mutilating body piercing, barbaric fashions, degenerate pop music, etc. Being raised in a Catholic, rock-free, TV-free homeschool they tend to experience the same sort of horror as did their grandmothers when confronted with the narcissistic and the disordered. They are, after all, innocent.

The fact that so many good people no longer wince in the face of what is so obviously and deeply disordered is precisely the problem. We have become those proverbial frogs bobbing up and down in the boiling waters of a satanic cultural milieu.

Alexander Pope was right:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated need but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

As a civilization we’ve moved well beyond the enduring phase and are preparing to embrace vices unimaginable to our fathers; and in its freshly-dug grave the Catholic family is being buried alive. That it should thus be considered unusual (much less “Amish”!) for Catholic parents to want to grab their little ones, clamber back out of the hole and run for high ground offers sobering commentary on the level of success the social engineers have attained in brainwashing us all.

Why isn’t everyone running for the high ground? How many generations are we to sacrifice to the gods of pop culture before we wake up to the fact that an anti-Christian, sex-addicted, drug-addicted culture of death is the greatest threat to Faith and family in the world today?  Homeschooling and Latin Masses are not magic bullets against this Beast, especially if parents are unwilling to drag their children away from the stinking, rotting cadaver that is pop culture.

It’s not the decrepit Novus Ordo establishment that should be our chief concern; it’s not China, North Korea, Muslim terrorists, or even the economic meltdown. It’s state-approved moral degeneracy, ubiquitous pornography, sexual addiction, narcissistic behavior, and the other toxins of the soul that spell doom for any civilization. Whether it’s the music, movies, the web, TV, video games—pop culture has become the buzzing neon of the underworld that turns the heads of our children and transforms their souls into virtual pillars of salt.

As for our “Amish like” position on the more destructive elements of highly addictive technology, I would just note the obvious: Our fathers and grandfathers didn’t possess PCD’s, iPods, PlayStations, video games, video phones, etc., and yet they lived their lives in relative peace—without need of therapy, prescription drugs or copious amounts of alcohol just to get through the day. They didn’t have handheld GPS units but they knew were they were and where they were going.  With the same wives at their sides for half a century or more and armies of little ones at their feet, they lived life in the real world, the one God created.

Look at us, on the other hand. We’re being driven mad by a sterile, virtual world of our own creation. We dutifully jump through one demonic hoop after another and call it “progress”.  We change wives like our grandfathers changed automobiles, we slaughter our babies, turn our homes into flophouses and our bedrooms into brothels. As old men with foreheads pumped full of Botox, our 'enlightened' society will choke itself to death on mouthfuls of Viagra.

“Progress” be damned!  If it’s “Amish” to insist that our children stay off line and avoid like the plague a pop culture spawned and marketed by people who hate Christ, then so be it.  Hitch up the horses.

If it’s “Amish” to observe that something is terribly wrong when young people spend most of their waking moments planning the next episode of their own inane “reality TV” program on Face Book, where everything revolves around them, their photos, their love lives, their parties, and their semi-literate prose modeled on the vapid lyrics of the empty-headed pop stars they emulate—well, break out the blue shirts and straw hats and let’s go raise a barn!

As for the “irony” of a Luddite using the Internet to make his case, I would argue that I’ve never claimed technology is intrinsically evil. In moderation, of course, adults can make good use of it. I have a cell phone, I use email, I am not anti-technology per se. There certainly are legitimate uses for computers and even the Internet. I believe setting up websites for Catholic apologetics, for example, is constructive but I don’t allow my children to go online to visit The Remnant’s site or any other. Why? Because the Internet is a global cesspool, and though there are endless sophisticated-sounding reasons for why we must—simply MUST—make our children Internet savvy, I’ve got to believe that Louis and Zellie Martin would have risked being numbered among the lampoonable “Amish” rather than install portholes to hell at their kitchen table or in their children’s bedrooms. They were, after all, trying to raise saints.

Let’s face it, we’re all in danger of developing addictions to the “signs and wonders” of an age steeped in the Luciferian; but as children everywhere are now being sucked into a highly destructive cultural vortex it seems dangerously foolhardy to dismiss as “Amish” those Catholic parents who step back from a fanatical attachment to pop culture and pop technology and say: Hold on a minute—something is wrong here!

If their children prefer to listen to wind and raindrops on the roof rather than iPods and mini TVs as they lie in their beds at night, we should all thank God for it. At least someone might survive long enough to carry the Faith into the future and tell the tragic story of what happened here. 

Similarly, if they are content to read books, play board games and roust around in the woods rather than spend their precious childhood years staring zombie-like at flashing lights on computer monitors, “networking” with God-know-who on Face Book, or desensitizing themselves with addictive video games, I guess I can live with that too.  If that’s Amish then God bless the Amish!

We have a crisis brewing where young people are concerned that few wish to acknowledge much less take seriously. Even within traditional Catholicism something is terribly wrong. Priests know it because they hear confessions. Teachers know it because they see the light in the eyes of their students growing dimmer each school year. Parents with older children now know it because the child catchers have already achieved considerable success even in the world of home schooling and Latin Masses.  If you have any doubts, log on to Face Book, access your child’s account (lots of luck!) and let the scales fall from your eyes.

With many, many noble exceptions (thanks be to God!), young adults are often veiled and kneeling at Latin Masses on Sunday morning with little apparent concern for the fact that they partied like Van Halen the night before. And why not, when their music is 24/7 indoctrination on sexual deviancy, their movies are how-to tutorials for debunking everything from Genesis to life after death, their video games are escape pods into dark fantasy where the prescripts of natural law can be broken at will, and their Internet provides instant access to every vice unfathomable in Christian civilization for two thousand years.

This is the front line—to replace the culture of death with the Catholic culture of life. I know of Catholic families who no longer even sit together for a family meal in the evenings.  Too busy with sports and leisure. Too often we’re all beguiled by the fashions and entertainments of the pagans. We are embarrassed by “doughty” Catholic fashions, customs, and the Catholic way of life.  We’ve become too comfortable, too entertained, too emasculated to even realize that our own survival is at stake and that our children are spiritually dying in their own beds every night.

Look around you. Drive by the local high school when classes are being let out. It’s no coincidence that everything is black—the clothes, the dyed hair, the eyes. Their souls are dying.

Look at the global canonization of Michael Jackson—pedophile and entertainer of children! The Devil’s last battle for the soul of Christian civilization is clearly being waged in homes, playgrounds and classrooms. He’s gathered his demons and stockpiled his most alluring cultural weapons for one final offensive against children, and unless we wake up to that fact we have no hope of surviving this cultural tsunami no matter how many Latin Masses we attend.

It’s a question of survival, and many parents who see the situation as I do have already declared a counteroffensive against this degenerate culture where abortion and “gay marriage” are but symptoms of a much more serious disease—a terminal disease of the soul that is making moral and spiritual zombies of children and using technology to instantly spread deadly viruses globally.

It’s not just dirty pictures or immoral lyrics anymore; it’s the erection of another Tower of Babel—an entirely anti-Christian way of life that encourages narcissism and self-indulgence at every stage of human development.  It’s me, my music, my entertainment, my career, my endless pursuit of a good time that matters.  And the pursuit of holiness?  Please! This is the “real world”.

You ask what my children think of my “extremist” views where culture is concerned. My reply is a statement of the obvious: There is a far greater sense of security for them here in the “Amish” Catholic home than in any of the modern flophouses where everyone's wearing headphones, Mom isn’t necessarily married to Dad, and the blue light of the television flickers like a virtual vigil light day and night. We're at war here, and the cultural ghouls lurking on the other side serve to unite rather than divide those families that still bother to pray and play together.

Call me old-fashioned, Amish, prudish, whatever. I really couldn't care any less.  I'll take my chances with that remnant of simple believers who still know they have a soul, that Hell exists, and that it's time for all of us to light real vigil lights, board up the virtual windows, and brace for an all out assault on family in the coming days of darkness such as the world has never before seen.

I appreciate your interest and hope our exchange here in The Remnant encourages more discussion along these lines throughout the Catholic world.  For, clearly, we're all running out of time.