From Martyrs to Bystanders: The Fall of the Church Militant
Would the Catholics of Modernism have scolded St Peter for being too aggressive at Pentecost? Would the very men and women who honor martyrs for dying for the Old Faith today have called them intolerant?
We live in an age where “love” has been redefined into tolerance, and where the courage that once sent saints across oceans has been replaced by the comfort of watching from the shore. Vatican II didn’t create this spirit of compromise–it simply normalized it. It baptized the apathetic. It turned the Church Militant into the Church Mild-like.
Columbus and Isabella believed souls could be lost forever without baptism of water and Spirit. They crossed oceans for that conviction. Most modern Catholics, catechized by Modernism, would condemn them for being “toxic” or “controlling.” But what if they were right–and we are the ones asleep?
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I speak as one who must, like St Paul said, work out my own salvation with fear and trembling. For years, I didn’t. I believed the modern lie that “it’s okay because we’re human,” that somehow God’s mercy erases the need for repentance, confession, and conversion. But the Cross still demands blood–not the wasted time of the lukewarm.
The new theology whispers that all paths lead to God, that pagans, atheists, and idolaters are mysteriously within the Body of Christ. Yet if that were true, why did Peter preach as he did–particularly right after Pentecost early in the Acts of the Apostles? Why did Stephen die rather than renounce the faith. Why did all the apostles except one bleed terrible deaths?
We’ve relegated ourselves to spectatorship of the very war for souls Christ commissioned us to fight. We love the comforts of living in America too much. Christ didn’t call bystanders or couch potatoes, though. He called disciples, rugged ones.
The question now isn’t whether the Ferdinand, Isabella, or Columbus I’ve been exploring were too militant–it’s whether we’ve become too effeminate, too castrated to stand where they stood, to endure what they endured, to fight what they fought.
(I apologize for the cover photo here, which YouTube chose for me. There is a way to change it for a short, but it’s not as straightforward as it is for a full video, and I haven’t found the way to do it yet).
