Today’s reading is from 1 Ez, 37: 21-28:
“Thus says the Lord GOD:
I will take the children of Israel from among the nations
to which they have come,
and gather them from all sides to bring them back to their land.
I will make them one nation upon the land,
in the mountains of Israel,
and there shall be one prince for them all.
Never again shall they be two nations,
and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms.”
I will take the children of Israel from among the nations
to which they have come,
and gather them from all sides to bring them back to their land.
I will make them one nation upon the land,
in the mountains of Israel,
and there shall be one prince for them all.
Never again shall they be two nations,
and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms.”
Catholic Fundamentalists see this reading as a prophecy that predicts the coming of Jesus, Who “shall be One Prince for them all.” The passage has a particularly clear meaning. Those who choose not to recognize His royal authority (“one prince for them all) will not be in His Kingdom.
The saddest people in the world are the lapsed Catholics who’ve left the Kingdom. While they are “just a Confession away” from readmission into the Eternal Kingdom, the longer they’re away, the less likely it is that they will take the necessary steps to return.
How we may help lapsed Catholics return to The Prince’s Kingdom:
One process that helps them get back to The Church is to let them realize why they left. Most lapsed Catholics do not understand that they are victims in the other side’s war against The Church. Until two or three generations ago, every large city in America was largely Catholic. The Church ran its own schools, universities, and hospitals. The Church provided its own charities and social services. Until the early 1950s, each city’s “political machine” was dominated by The Church.
The State hated the competition. Beginning in the 1950s, neo-Babylonians declared open war on The Church. The opening battles began by building broad super-highways smack through the middle of every city’s Catholic Parishes. The resulting dislocation with concrete barriers, cloverleafs, and fences drove residents to the suburbs. There, to the joy of Babylon’s banker allies, they had to have mortgages.
Suburban areas were elated that tax revenue skyrocketed to pay for the huge, new schools. During the same period, hordes of unemployed American Blacks were brought up from the South, where mechanized cotton pickers and planters had destroyed millions of their jobs. The new immigrants were forced to live in huge “projects”, and everything possible was provided to turn them into dependency, crime, or both. They reliably voted for the most leftist public officials and administrations as the cities collapsed, as the “urban planners” won victory after victory.
New, anti-Catholic political machines seized power. They accelerated the push of White Catholics into the surrounding suburbs and beyond. America’s cities were lost to all but the poorest and the richest.
Many of those who left their city parishes went past the suburbs, and sailed into the Protestant seas surrounding America’s cities. Suddenly, they could no longer walk to their parish Church, but had to drive. Their children could no longer walk to school. They were forced to take long, painful bus rides to schools far from home. Many of their new neighbors were active Protestants. Others had lapsed from Protestant denominations and were a generation closer to disappearance. All their new neighbors told the recently arrived Catholics, with a sincerity that can only come from overwhelming ignorance, “It doesn’t matter what church you go to, or if you go, as long as you believe.”
Many Catholics accepted this as sound theology, and began to stray. As a result, a surprising demographic fact emerged: in many outlying counties and townships, over half the people, though they rarely darken the door of a Catholic Church, identify themselves as Catholics.
Most lapsed Catholics don’t realize that they are victims of Babylon’s ongoing war on God and His people. Helping them understand the powerful political processes that prompted and pushed them to unbelief and disobedience may help the less vain among them make the return necessary to spend eternity in The Prince’s Kingdom.
