When I was a girl, my Protestant parents used to watch a man called Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. They wouldn’t allow me to watch with them. He was a Catholic, you see, and they didn’t want me to equate Catholicism with this man’s greatness.
Alas, I converted to Catholicism as a young mother, when I had my first of many babies. I heard others speak of Sheen, saying that people of all faiths watched his weekly show: Jews, Muslims, Protestants, and even atheists. I began reading his books and watching his shows on YouTube in about 2015 and I’m so glad I did.
Yesterday, I listened to him speak on communism for two hours. One of the surprising things I learned is that rather than forming in the streets of Moscow in the early 1900s, it was conceived in 19th century Europe. According to Sheen, the philosophy itself came from Germany via Karl Marx. The sociology from France and the economics from England.
“What Russia gave it,” says Sheen, “was an Asiatic soul and power and force.”
After the iron curtain came down, many people thought communism was, for the most part, dead. Even though it still reigned in China, no one seemed to worry about it overmuch. Yet, here we are. Whether you call it ‘stakeholder capitalism’ or ‘progressivism’ or something else, it’s still communism.
Communism is an avenger, of sorts, a punisher
[Paraphrased from Ven. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen] Communism is more than simply a social system, according to Sheen, it’s also a religion and it has a specific role for civilizations upon which it preys. In the Gospels of both Luke and Matthew, Our Lord says, “Where the body, there shall the vultures gather.” In other words, vultures come around when there’s a decaying carcass for them to scavenge.
This is a symbol for civilizations, warns Sheen, for they die too — just as all living things die. So, communism’s role is an avenger, a punishment on a kind of death and corruption.
“Whenever a civilization begins to crumble, morally or spiritually, then there begins to appear vultures. And that is the mission of communism in this world. Communism is the scavenger of decaying civilizations. It makes its way into a culture only when that culture begins to rot from the inside.” ~ Fulton J Sheen
The vultures are descending upon us
As history teaches us, most cultures decay from within and ours is no different. The rot and decay becomes more obvious with each passing day. It seems, even, to have accelerated at an astonishingly rapid pace over the past three years.
Our government’s putrid corruption, grift, and unhinged poverty of logic has ravaged its own people. Our president, a dimwitted pedophilic liar, seems hell-bent on destroying our economy. Even corporations and investment managers, historically concerned with turning a profit, have abandoned their customer base to embrace ESG and the latest social justice trends.
We’ve been through over three years of medical tyranny, which has murdered, maimed, and psychologically harmed countless millions. And it’s not over yet.
Our elections are compromised beyond repair. Judges regularly let violent criminals free, while imprisoning ‘trespassers’ and ‘insurrectionists’ without bail or trial. Our borders are wide open. Even the FBI, no longer the respected and awe-inspiring agency of men like Eliot Ness, has taken to subverting the Bill of Rights by targeting religious groups.
Public schools are no longer institutions of true learning, but purveyors of deviance and victimhood. Their ‘drag queen story hour’ shows denigrate the dignity and innocence of children with displays of sexual perversion and acts of child grooming. All sanctioned by our ‘betters.’
The feminist movement, LGBT+ deviants, and transsexual proponents destroy lives and foment social chaos with abandon.
We have lost our way. The strong faith of our nation has died. We have abandoned God. The vultures are coming, many have already landed and begun to feed.
“The great shame of the world is that we have the Truth, but we have no zeal. They have zeal, but they have no Truth.” ~ Fulton J. Sheen on the zeal of those who promote communism
I’m not sure we even have Truth as Sheen proposes it above, for if we had truth, we would fight for it and root out what is wrong. Would we not? We’ve no more time to go along to get along with what we know is wrong — both morally and naturally. We must turn up the fire. There’s no more room for lukewarm middle ground.
“But, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth.” ~ Apocalypse 3:16, Holy Bible, Douay-Rhames translation
This is such an intriguing post. Loved how beautifully things are written..
I too have a piece that I am sharing, do have a look.. in your spare time.
Something different, something magical, something that expresses visually and caligraphically.
https://kallolpoetry.substack.com/p/rootless-existence-a-dissection-through
The vultures have landed