When I was about four years old, I lived in West Babylon, New York. A sidewalk encircled the perimeter of the house. Once, during one of many quests of the imagination, a friend and I heard pleas for help from underneath a crack in the sidewalk. They — if I remember correctly — were innocent captives in a realm of monsters, and soon, if no brave souls ventured to save them, they too would become monsters. Naturally, we were the only ones who could hear the voices, but that was fine: somehow, someway, we just knew they could only be saved by us alone. It was a call to action answered by two Long Island boys from the South Shore, barely old enough to ride the Ferris wheel alone. We tried to break apart the concrete with plastic snow shovels to no avail, and soon forgot all about the affair when mom prepared a lunch of fishsticks and iced tea.

It’s been many years since those summer days — two decades, to be exact. I grew up a bit quicker than many, I’m told, and a mind that compels one to save citizens from mystical lands found an adolescence firmly planted in a rationalized-away reality. We all experience this for better or worse.

It’s bittersweet.

A peculiar rite of passage has emerged from the moment natural imagination evaporates with the sweat of maturation. Maybe it’s 6th grade, or the first paid job, or the entrance into High School. Maybe it’s when a child’s parents divorce and the family environment crumbles — an event marking the “growth” of too many children, these days. Whatever the cause, modernity — that charged, contentious word sparking debate and dispute — moves into the vacant home imagination leaves behind. The latter has time only to pack all its precious belongings in a cramped suitcase before the next train leaves town. Flustered and confused, it buys a ticket to nowhere. Nowhere good, at least.

In darker days, I found Imagination emaciated, huddled under filthy blankets, in a slum at the bottom of a valley where nothing can truly grow and the only way to rise above the depths was getting high. For some reason unknown to me, Imagination found company with two fellows I’d later become acquainted with in Confirmation: Good and Evil.

Humans long for a relationship with metaphysical reality. The pursuit of divinity is a universal trait among all peoples of the Earth, across the entirety of space and time — even if the individual casts aside the divine as hogwash. In our own time, we’ve enshrined the material and ephemeral as divine, and naturally, our orientation towards an objective morality has evaporated like morning dew at midday. No longer can value from children’s fantasies of heroic tales be extracted, for the beasts are banished to the far-off realm of subjectivity, and yesterday’s foes are today’s friends anyways. Both are symptoms of the same spiritual myopia that prevents our culture from seeing the emptiness behind the mirrors adorning the walls of our collective home.

About a year ago, I worked at an independent bookstore. For a short time, I was entrusted with categorizing the inventory. The warm overhead light, an incandescent holdout from the LED revolution, slowed my pace of work. One shift, with not much to do, I read the back of a young adult’s novel. It concerned the drama of a closeted teenager with same-sex attraction. The only other person who knew of his disordered sexuality was an anonymous adult male, steeped in the homosexual lifestyle, who chatted with the protagonist online. It was a literary celebration of pedophilic grooming. My gut reaction was to toss all three copies of the “book” into the dumpster behind the store, but I respected the store owners and Christians aren’t called to commit acts of petty vandalism. When the bewilderment wore away, I entertained more rational outlets of expressing the outrage: showing my peers, and perhaps my supervisors, the kind of trash the distributors decided to send us.

Who, though, to tell? The store owners who were, undoubtedly, proponents of such bruised sexualities in the name of tolerance and progress? The two female coworkers who embraced a confused male employee as their pet gay? The self-proclaimed Marxist who deemed traditional masculinity as toxic, almost a year before the American Psychological Association stated their tacit agreement? I was a covert Catholic-to-be who didn’t want to make a vocal stand, and the courage from communion was unknown to me; I had yet to finish my conversion process (the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults).

This set a dark tone for similar, yet more severe, events to come. Had you told me we’d see open child exploitation in the final days of 2018, I’d nervously retort that, surely, we can’t be that determined to emulate Gomorrah. In the future, perhaps — but not this soon. Alas, motus in fine velocior — movement is faster at the end. On December 1st, 2018, Desmond Napoles, an eleven-year-old boy with autism, performed in drag for a 21-and-over bar in Brooklyn, New York. The management of the bar, 3 Dollar Bill, saw nothing wrong with Desmond headlining the evening’s debauchery. Neither did the adult patrons who carnivorously threw money at the dancing boy, enticing him to reveal more and more of his tormented flesh.

Americans became aware of the Afghani “dancing boys” phenomenon when our soldiers fought in those ancient lands. We were horrified, and rightfully so.

Eighteen years later, we’ve embraced it with open arms.

The Republic is failing as its citizens dive deeper into the pools of mire and sin. I can no longer, with intellectual responsibility and a clean conscience, define the battles of our times along ideological lines. Certain concepts such as national security, immigration, and economics require nuanced discussion, but the very tenets of human nature are under attack as the foundations of humanity, society, and family are undermined. Simple truths about the human condition have been dragged kicking and screaming into the political coliseum as proponents like myself are forced to watch them get disemboweled with blades of Progressivism — an opponent that discriminates against none and murders all who stand in its way.

Equality at last.

It was always going to be this way. Always. Recanted in John 15:20 is a warning from our Lord: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you.” Sin is the great death, the melody of the Liar; it is untruth, and in its pervasiveness is an ability to mimic order itself and greatly magnify its potency. In the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Saint John Paul II named such entities “structures of sin” which involve “powerful cultural, economic, and political currents”. If the early post-Augustan Roman Empire is a megastructure of sin in its personification of vice, corruption, and brutality, then our own empire of sorts must be one as well, considering that all institutions conceivable — the media, the universities, public education, and the banks, to name a few — are tainted with sin’s drive towards undermining Christian, and indeed Catholic, values. If such organized fronts against objective truth and morality are ubiquitous throughout history, then is any specific ideology or philosophy to blame? More so, if our transcendent God is absolute truth, absolute love, and absolute beauty, he is order — and his Word is our life, our path, the rock which all is founded upon. If His will is attacked both in our age and ages bygone, is not the tyranny of modernity but another episode in the war against order itself?

When darkness mimics order — a constant that does not and cannot change — horror follows. Countless examples are found in the last hundred years. God — order — does not will genocide, but the Armenians and Jews knew it nonetheless. Marxists overthrew Imperial Russian order only to establish a totalitarian empire of suffering in revolution’s wake. The 60’s, widely celebrated as a moment of liberation, enshrined casual sex — the debasement of the human and their separation from the divine purpose — something now more common than chastity. These examples are low-hanging fruit, easily seen and ripe for the picking. A more contemporary example: a state senate, once an entity that exercised reason more than a fifth of the time, voted 38-24 in favor of allowing abortions up to delivery, leading the the nation in human extermination.

Such developments are increasing in frequency and not without direction. The interrogation of Judicial nominee Brian Buescher for his membership in the Knights of Columbus and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent statement on “radical traditional Catholicism” are mild clues of what’s to come, and while the latter is based on legitimate concerns about the possible formation of fringe groups, it won’t be long before “mainline” traditional Catholics are considered hateful dissidents in line with the likes of neo-Nazis, racial supremacists, and other labels from the far-Right. We will be deemed disruptive, ideologically foreign (as if our creed was simply ideological), and culturally backwards, but only before we are labelled un-American as we find ourselves at odds with a State that increasingly resembles the governments which led our beloved saints to martyrdom. Given this trajectory, I won’t be surprised when one remarks that the best days of many Christians and most Catholics are behind us, and that there are troubling times waiting for us just beyond the veil of the foreseeable future.

We are seeing this already outside the West. Release International has predicted a sharp rise in Christian persecution for 2019. No surprise. Last year, Aid to the Church in Need reported that Christian persecution, at the time of the report, was the worst it had ever been in human history. Not much has changed since 2018 regarding the forces driving the violent persecutions, and I’d wager 2019 will only continue last year’s grim reality.

It’s easy to talk about persecution in Africa or Asia. Mention the possibility of active persecution in the United States, and people grow uncomfortable.

Good. Being comfortable in the world prevents us from dying to the world and its wicked ways. Must we all live a spartan lifestyle of self-imposed hardship? No, but we must ask our Lord to prepare us for spiritual battle, for even though He is the captain of this ship, the clouds gather and darken as the wind whispers of rough seas ahead. It takes courage to approach Him with this request, for to ask for strength, many must first feel vulnerable. To reveal vulnerability, one must first open their eyes to truth, and to do so, one must be willing to let a foundation of lies — reinforced by the popular teachings of modern intelligentsia — crumble, even if an entire life has been built upon it.

Take this to our Lord in prayer and in the Mass. Present it to Him as you contemplate the mysteries in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I have. My mind wandered across the countless pages of history’s tomes as it searched for what could best prepare a Christian man living in modernity for the fights ahead. Nothing was sufficient. The saints are all examples to emulate, but for many of us who share in St. Thomas’ momentary failure, we need something concrete.

One evening, I contemplated the writing on the wall of things to come in the silence of an adoration chapel. I entered with disquiet in my heart, but as I uttered those old familiar prayers — the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be — I felt a compulsion to read scripture. A bible was in reach. Opening to the Gospel of Matthew, my eyes fell upon a passage that, I think, is often overlooked:

Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3)

To be a child is to be totally dependent. Our moral compass is broken when man decides for himself what is right and wrong. If we stay close by our Father’s side and let Him lead us on the path of righteousness, we’ll never be lost to the savage wilderness or the streets and avenues of our falling metropolis. This is spiritual advice that, when faithfully followed, provokes a great change in the heart of man: upon completely surrendering ourselves to our Lord and becoming His children, the infinite imagination of our childhood is recovered from the dustbins of our lunacy, and only then can we approach the looking-glass and see a knight in shining armor gazing back, clad in the Word, ready for the King’s orders at a moment’s notice. Only then can we see, once again, the great dragons and other beasts of darkness that prowl about the land, stalking our communities to sate their hungers of the flesh. After answering God’s call with praise and worship, it is only one of His children on the path of righteousness who can stare down the enemies before us, agents of a wicked, wicked world, and feel only happiness and peace. Even if the body is tortured, attacked, and destroyed, that’s quite OK, for they can never hurt a soul resting in God. Behind the vulgar shrieks and violent cries of those who slay us, it is us, children of the Father, who see the content face of a Son who knows our pain all too well, welcoming us into eternal salvation — not after saving our lives, but spending them for His will.

Indeed, the lines are drawn. The sun sets on the rosy idea of an egalitarian society’s inherent pacifism. Soon, it will no longer be about party against party, nation against nation, or one people against another. It will be good against evil. It will be time to face the monsters of our youth that were always right behind us, hiding under the blankets of our disbelief. Fear not and find courage: it’s time to wear the cuirass of faith, march out into the world, and let the armor He’s given us reflect the eternal light of truth, love, and beauty across a civilization sliding into the putrid fens of lies, hatred, and ugliness . . . and in God’s gift of light-heartedness to those who call him Father, you may even find a great deal of fun and excitement in the adventure.

I know I do.





