Thursday, March 23, 2017

Pentecostalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Vatican II -- The Holy Spirit in the 20th Century


by David Pence


It was a bloody century. Darwin, Marx, and Freud, the matured intellectual fruit of the godless West, corrupted our sensibilities of nature, history, and the human soul.

Darwin played out first. The free trade companies and national armies of the white races divided up Africa and Asia until they were shocked by the Japanese who went beyond Darwin and Adam Smith to defeat the Russians, expel the British, and bloody the Americans. Imperial Japan presented themselves to their fellow plundered Asians as a divinely ordained fighting super race from the East. After stunning victories they were mired in China; and were eventually bombed into submission by the U.S. The Germans grasped the military implications of Darwin before the rest of Europe, and organized themselves as an armed race. Hitler had contempt for Christianity and considered Jews not as a competing race but a kind of infection polluting racial identity. He played by the ground rules of Darwin’s chief works -- animals do not act for their species; the strongest race wins. Like the Japanese, the Nazis achieved a brief period of military domination. They too were destroyed.

The second scientific idea of the modern West replaced the universal sensibilities of religion and the political loyalties of citizenship with the class loyalties of the proletariat ruled by a party of intellectuals. Scientific socialism reigned in two non-western lands -- turning Russia from an Orthodox multinational empire into the Soviet Union, and serving as an organizational ideology for the unification of China under Mao Zedong. In the western countries the Marxists took more turf in the universities and movie industry than the national militaries or manufacturing plants. But in the east, this western ideology organized the states.

When the communist structures gave way to the more fundamental bonds of religion and nations, the last death gasp of the godless West desacralized the sexual order in the name of female equality and individual autonomy. The European Union, the UN, and the Democratic Party in the United States constructed administrative states and courts to enforce their strange ideology of globalism, democracy, sexual confusion, and individualism. That ideology still reigns in the universities, news bureaus, and Hollywood but the empress no longer emits the hormonal confidence of a ruler. We are witnessing what is called in the world of queen bees and drones "a colony collapse." The bloody century of the soulless West which gave humanity Darwinian racism, scientific Communism, and gender ideology is passing. No one should weep for this collapse and no one should confuse the demise of a soulless western woman with her attendant geldings as the eclipse of Christendom.

There is one great conspiracy that continually and ubiquitously acts in history. It is the movement of the Holy Spirit to draw men into communion with the Son to obey the Will of the Father. There is always a sharp limit to the conspiratorial powers of evil. The spirit of the Nazis did not play well with the Slavs; and the Han Chinese never really thought the Japanese were establishing a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere that would bind the two as brothers. But the Spirit of Life who animated the first cell to develop into all the plants and animals of our earth is never done drawing life together on our space ship Earth.

Early in the 20th century -- in Topeka, Kansas, and in Los Angeles -- the Spirit began to penetrate the souls of men and women. There were gifts of tongues as well as healings and conversions. There was a sensitivity to the soul and Spirit and a disregard of skin color and social class. This Pentecostal movement has now covered the globe in a century. The fastest growing form of Christianity, they are 500 million strong. They are found in the big cities and small hamlets of America. They are shouting for joy in Latin America and singing God’s praise in Asia and Africa. The Western intellectuals have constructed ever new ideologies to battle the sacred order, but their constructs have failed. Christianity animated by the Spirit and submitting to the Will of the Father grows and lives.

In the middle of the 20th century in the middle of the United States, another movement of the Spirit in black Pentecostal as well as more traditional black Baptist Churches stirred believers to demand that the spiritual dignity of all souls taught by biblical Christianity be realized in the civic life of Christian America. That message was old as the Scriptures but the returning black veterans, the blowing winds of the Holy Spirit, and the leadership of godly pastors converged in place and time to sound a more clarion trumpet. It was the fitting time of the Lord and you could hear it in the music: "A Change was Gonna Come." Like the first Pentecostal movement in Los Angeles, it was a sign of the Spirit that black and white would be struck together by the same Spirit and would overcome together that old Liar.
 
There was another Spirit-driven meeting across the ocean in 1962 led by an 80-year-old Italian peasant. He listened to the Spirit and called together 2500 bishops, abbots, and fathers of the worldwide Catholic Church. In their opening statement they announced themselves as an apostolic brotherhood of fathers: "This very conciliar congress of ours so impressive in the diversity of races, nations and languages, does it not bear witness to a community of brotherly love and shine as a visible sign of it? We are giving witness that all men are brothers, whatever their race or nation.... We trust the Holy Spirit, call on our brethren, fellow Christians and all men of good will that through love God’s kingdom may shine out on earth in some fashion as a preview of God’s eternal Kingdom."

John XXIII

The Second Vatican Council was called to renew the Catholic Church so she could better show herself as the Body of Christ drawing the nations of humanity into our common destiny as a common people of God. At the heart of the Council was a renewal of the sacred liturgy in which the Catholic faithful led by their local bishops in over 2,000 dioceses around the world would pray to the Holy Spirit that He would draw them into the presence and sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. This liturgical renewal deeply tied to social justice movements was to reject the individualism of the Enlightenment revolutionaries and the totalitarian impulses of atheistic communism. The liturgy of the Mystical Body of Christ shaped the communal personalities of Catholics to lead families and nations in the way of the Lord. The Spirit had whetted the souls of other men outside the Catholic fold to hunger and thirst for this apostolic presentation of the Eucharistic presence of Christ. In the Charismatic movement of fifty years ago, the Spirit opened the hearts of Catholics to other Christians praying to the Father under the direction of the Spirit. Now He has given us a Pope who has prayed and been inspired in the halls of Christian Pentecostals in his native Argentina. Peter has come again to the house of Cornelius.

The Church brings to the Pentecostals in this age of formlessness the apostolic bonds of public masculine brotherhood; the monogamous sacramental bonds of male/female marriage; and the persona of Mary, Virgin and Mother. In her biography the less public features of Christian culture are given form as spiritual interiority and the acts of mercy. The Spirit is the bond of communion but the living forms of communion are transmitted by the ecclesial authorities of the Church, the civic authorities of the nations, and the perfection of femininity in the person of Our Lady.

In the Acts of the Apostles we read of Peter speaking to the household of an Italian centurion Cornelius. As the head of the apostles was speaking to them, "the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word." He baptized them with no further rituals (circumcision) performed. When he returned to Jerusalem and was criticized, Peter answered: "…the Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us in the beginning. If then God gave to them the same gift He gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, then who was I to withstand God?"

The Second Vatican Council began in October of 1962. The atheist peasant premier of the Soviet Union and the Catholic president of the United States were in a nuclear showdown over missiles in Cuba. In February of 2016 a Roman Pontiff (Francis) and Russian Orthodox Patriarch (Kirill) met for the first time in 1000 years. They, too, met in Cuba.  "Finally," said Francis, "we are brothers."

Patriarch Kirill and President Putin

Our Lady of Fatima appeared to peasant children in Portugal in 1917, promising the conversion of Russia if the Church turned her heart back to Our Lady and the will of the Father. For decades Catholics prayed special prayers for such a conversion after every Mass. Multiple popes have consecrated Russia and the nations to the heart of Mary. Patriarch Kirill has described the openness of President Putin to the Christian ordering of Russian society as "a miracle." In the United States a presidential candidate has defeated the foreign policy establishment of both parties and all the think tanks and media outlets with a simple proposal to continue the work of Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, James Baker, and Eduard Shevardnadze and work for peace among the Christian superpowers. But who will take seriously this world of Marian apparitions, the universe of Pentecostals speaking in tongues, and a president who says it's time to make real peace with Russia?

As Christianity has spread like a fire from heaven among the adults of poor countries, and as the Russians rid themselves of their atheist ideology, the rich countries promulgated the last atheistic revolution of the West: feminism for females, sexual libertinism for males, and gender ideology for all. The baby boomer presidents and their power partners made changing gender roles the litmus of social status at home, while declaring gender inequality abroad as a threat to American national security. The Chinese youth led by their aging tyrant and his younger fanatical actress wife were in their own rebellion against all traditional forms of authority and the natural order. For them it was Mao’s 'Little Red Book' and the sentiments of young mobs who would rule. It would be a dozen years before the restoration of Deng Xiaoping signaled the return of adult authorities to rule that country. In the declining West, the return of patriarchy and sacred order would take longer.

The Second Vatican Council ended just before the Chinese Cultural Revolution began. The Council was a meeting of male authorities -- a proposal not for revolution, but concord under God. There was no attempt to rid the world of national borders or destroy patriarchy or public fraternity. The rule of God the Father is the very definition of patriarchy, and this they unashamedly affirmed. The loyalties and duties of men as citizens to their respective fatherlands was considered a natural communal form to be baptized and strengthened, not destroyed. Sixty years after the Council, that sensibility of a brotherhood of fathers in either Church or civic life is considered an enemy of progress by the adolescent West.

The Spirit, however, has plowed amidst the great field of humanity and raised up souls ready to hear more of God’s plan for the Church and nations. These souls have experienced the Spirit and now wait for Peter and the apostles to confirm their experience by drawing them into an even deeper form of communion in the Eucharistic Church.

The prayer of the Council was that there be peace among the nations and greater unity among Christians. But real unity among Christians always depends on a purification of the apostles. Judas must be washed out. Mathias and Paul must be welcomed in. There can be no clear thinking about men, nations, and religion in America unless American Catholics can rid themselves of the unpunished homosexuality corrupting its episcopacy and the feminist implant poisoning the intellectual life of our universities, high schools, and chanceries. It is not America which has become post-Christian, but Christian institutions which have adopted gender ideology as their new religion. It isn’t auto plants or plating factories where gay marriages are touted. It is in Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Episcopal Churches. Especially in the single-sex institutions of American Catholicism, a significant number of the paid careerists (clergy and staff) are adherents of an incestuous satanic gender ideology masquerading as Christianity. The Marian Church blushes as the Apostolic body putrifies.

Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles

Public Christianity is a brotherhood of fathers under God. But the mainline Christian churches of America and the all-male clergy of the Catholics has rejected public brotherhood as a sin of exclusion, like racism, rather than a form of communion that overcomes race and class distinctions.  Brotherhood can be betrayed by a murderer like Cain or the incestuous kiss of a Judas. Black, white, and brown Christianity is coming back. It was that very interracial mark that signaled the Spirit during the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. It is that spirit that will celebrate a masculine multicolored nationalism that will bring the peace of order to our inner cities again. And it is that spirit of Godly fraternity that could bring a new  spirit to international relations in gathering a concert of great powers and state authorities to crush the Salafist jihadists who war against Shia, Hindu, Christian, and Jewish peoples in the hijacked name of Sunni Islam.

Let us heed the Holy Spirit of Vatican II and the worldwide Pentecostal movement. Let us face with courage what Cardinal Robert Sarah called the twin demonic forces of our age: the gender ideology of the West and the demonic jihadists of Salafism. May our nation repent and reform; and let us join Christians and men of good will in every land to make great again God’s Holy Name.

 

"Come, let us return to the Lord;
    for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
    he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
    on the third day he will raise us up,
    that we may live before him.
Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;
    his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
    as the spring rains that water the earth."
                 (the prophet Hosea, whom the Lord directed to marry a prostitute and endure her unfaithfulness)
    

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