Are You Prepared for a Spiritual Battle?

And Mattathias cried out in the city with a loud voice, saying, Whosoever is zealous for the law, and maintains the covenant, let him come forth after me. - 1 Maccabees 2:27. 

'for victory in battle stands not in the multitude of an army, but strength is from heaven.' 1 Maccabees 3:19. 

There is a spiritual war out there. The adversary is fighting with all of his might and is convincing many people that God is not important, that the government can and will take the place of God, and that somehow God has forgotten us. None of these are true. But why do so many people believe them?

If you do not believe me, maybe you will believe Pope Leo XIII, who on October 13, 1884, exactly 33 years to the day before the Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, had a terrifying vision of the future of the Church. With a handful of cardinals and Vatican staff members in attendance, Pope Leo XIII finished celebrating Mass in the Vatican Chapel. Suddenly, he stopped at the foot of the altar, his face turned ashen white, and he remained standing for about ten minutes in a trance-like state.  

Later, when asked what had happened, Pope Leo XIII said that as he was about to leave the altar he heard two voices. One voice was of a kind and gentle nature, while the other voice was guttural and grating. Pope Leo experienced a vision of the future concerning the Church in which the power of Satan would be unleashed for a period of 100 years.  He was so shaken by the specter of the destruction of moral and spiritual values both inside and outside the Church that he composed a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, which he ordered to be said at the end of each Mass throughout the Catholic Church. Here is that prayer:

St Michael the Archangel defend us in the day of battle.  Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.  May God restrain him, we humbly pray, and do thou, the prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.  Amen.

The prayer to St Michael was said consistently thereafter throughout the Church at the end of Low Mass (in the Tridentine rite) until the Mass was revised in the Novus Ordo at the end of the 1960s.  

Did Satan get turned loose on the Church?

In Bishop Fulton Sheen’s 1947 prediction, he said, “We are at the end of Christendom. Christendom is economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending — we’ve seen it die. Look at the symptoms: the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty.”

At the heart of this new idea of Liberalism and social gospel for the masses, we see that all things come together. Bishop Fulton Sheen predicted.

At heart, the AntiChrist is the ruler of this world. The false prophet teaches a religion that is only of this world.

All the world’s systems and false religions combine to convince us of this fact. Here are some of the AntiChrist systems of thought prevalent in our culture today:

• Materialism: there is no other world. This is it.
• Scientism only scientifically tested knowledge is valid.
• Historicism there is no over-arching providence. History is random.
• Evolutionism in the natural world develops at random. There is no divine plan.
• Utilitarianism what works is all that matters. Efficiency and economy are our gods.
• Rationalism there is no such thing as Revelation. Your reasoning power is your only access to truth.
• Sentimentalism your feelings are your only guide because there is no objective truth
• Moral Relativism there is no great Law. Therefore you may do as you wish. In fact, this is the motto of diabolism: “Do as you Will.”

These are being taught in our society today.  In fact according to page 3, of the Washington Post, Section A for Tuesday, March 30, 2021, in an article entitled, Religious membership in the U.S. falls below 50%, poll finds, they quoted   Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who had argued in a recent essay for the Atlantic that what was once a religious belief has been replaced by political belief in many communities. On the political right, he said in an interview, conservative Christians focused on Trump as a political savior rather than on their traditional questions of morality.

And on the political left, Hamid said, strains of wokeism have taken religious notions like sin and ex-communication and repurposed them for secular ends. Hamid said that because there aren’t clear leaders, such as priests or imams, or a transcendent source that defines belief, the standards for what is considered “woke” continue to change.

“The vacuum [of religion] can’t just remain a vacuum,” Hamid said. “Americans are believers in some sense, and there have to be structures of belief and belonging. The question is, what takes the place of that religious affiliation?”

Are these the same political beliefs that were to take the place of religious beliefs in the Seleucid Empire? Is this what  Mattathias was warning us about in 1 Maccabees 2:27. “And Mattathias cried out in the city with a loud voice, saying, Whosoever is zealous for the law, and maintains the covenant, let him come forth after me.”

It appears that the time is near, are you now ready to answer the call?  Are you ready for a spiritual battle?  It has happened before and it appears to be happening again?   Amen