“THE sublime function, to which the faithful owe their fathers and guides in the spiritual life, has, however, a special interest, at this period of the year, which, more than any other, is in keeping with the present state of the world, which is one of rapid decline towards ruin. Our year, too, is on the fall, as we say. The sun, which, we beheld rising at Christmas, as a giant who would burst the bonds of frost asunder, and restrain the tyranny of darkness, now, as though he had grown wearied, is drooping towards the horizon; each day, we see him gradually leaving that glorious zenith, where we admired his dazzling splendour, on the day of our Emmanuel’s Ascension; his fire has lost its might; and though he still holds half the day as his, his disc is growing pale. All this foretells the approach of those long nights, when nature, stripped of all her loveliness by angry storms, seems as though she would bury her self, for ever, in the frozen shroud which is to bind her. So is it with our world. Illumined as it was by the light of Christ, and glowing with the fire of the Holy Ghost, it sees, in these our days, that charity is growing cold, and that the light and glow it had from the Sun of Justice, are on the wane. Each revolution takes from the Church some jewel or other, which does not come back to her when the storm is over; tempests are so frequent, that tumult is becoming the normal state of the times. Error predominates, and lays down the law. Iniquity abounds. It is our Lord himself who said: ‘When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find, think ye, faith on earth?’
“Lift up, then, your heads, ye children of God! for your redemption is at hand. But, from now, until that time shall come, when heaven and earth are to be made new for the reign that is to be eternal, and shall bloom in the light of the Lamb, the Conqueror, days far worse than these, must dawn upon this world of ours, when the elect themselves would be deceived, if that were possible!” [emphasis addded]
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Ember-Days of September,” The Liturgical Year (Transl. Dom Laurence Shepherd), 1875
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Who are the elect to whom the holy abbot refers, quoting Scripture, in these words that come from the tumultuous 19th century?
They are, and can be none other than, Catholics (and all would-be Christians.)
Guéranger knew, as all the Fathers of the Church knew, that Catholics would fall into a terrible deception. This deception would bring down even the most pious and well-intentioned among them. And that is exactly what has happened. The elect have been deceived. Not only have the lukewarm been deceived by the Great Apostasy of Vatican II, but the most zealous have been taken in, especially by the Big Traditionalist Swindle with its seductive outposts, its incense and mitres purchased on Amazon, its sublime virgins singing Gregorian chant on Twitter and Facebook, its brilliant and erudite analysts who dissect every heresy of Vatican II, its innocent children dressed in neat uniforms and preserved by the best-intentioned parents from the perversions and atheism of “education” — yes, these oases and refuges, these wolves in vestments, are renegade each and every one by all the disciplinary standards of the Church. They have been deceived — organized deception, not the bloody persecution of martyrs in the Colosseum being the dominant strategy of the combined forces of anti-Christ naturalism at this time, aimed not at the body but at the mind and heart and the deepest recesses of the soul. For Satan wants your soul more than he wants your body.
‘When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find, think ye, faith on earth?’
Like the Pharisees who turned away from Jesus when he spoke of his coming death and refused to accept a Messiah on these humbling and seemingly disgraceful terms, Catholics in their immense pride and ingratitude for all the treasures God has given them over the course of 2,000 years scorn to believe that, yes, this ruin and death is none other than their glorious and immaculate Bride of Christ. They turn their backs and walk away.
The embers of Christian civilization smolder about us. Rejoice, ye children.
Rejoice ye unworthy ones, ye who have by some inexplicable miracle not lost your childish simplicity and thus can see through the shadows and lies — ye children, your redemption is at hand.
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