Western Civilisation Is Possessed By an Impure Spirit

devil, demon, satan, evil, temptation, swearing

Something is awry with Western culture. The civilisation that inherited the intellectual riches of ancient Greece, that founded the university system and gave rise to stunning advances in science, seems to have lost the capacity for plain reason. If you have any doubts about that, then listen to Orwellian statements on “essential healthcare” and “reproductive rights” by prominent politicians from Kamala Harris to Justin Trudeau to Boris Johnson.

The Civilisation that Developed the First Hospitals, Exterminating the Vulnerable

Not only has the West got a problem with the employment of reason, it has also lost a grip on one of its seminal convictions: that the most vulnerable in society have the right to the greatest care.  During the early medieval period, the Christian belief in the dignity of all human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, gave rise to the first hospitals (in the modern sense) to provide care for the sick and dying.

The letter to the Hebrews memorably exhorted: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Heb 13:2). In our time, by contrast, doctors who have taken the Hippocratic oath to uphold life, have little regard for the angels under their care, as they routinely “terminate” the unborn, the elderly, the seriously ill, and even – in Belgium and Holland – the lives of children under twelve. The scale of the slaughter is staggering, over twenty million abortions are carried out per year in Western democracies alone.

The Civilisation of Renaissance Culture, Producing Vulgar Music, Drama and Art

Western culture inherited the Greek and Roman appreciation for aesthetic beauty but took art to a new spiritual level. According to Jewish and Islamic thought, it was illegitimate to create an image of God, which was a form of idolatry. Christian civilisation, however, with its central tenet that God had taken on a human form, realized that art could give beautiful expression to divine truths and lift the human spirit towards God.

This led to the great artistic achievements of medieval and Renaissance culture, much of which is on a religious theme. In our day, Western culture has overseen often vulgar “developments” in music, art, and drama. The Vatican crib this past Christmas was a reminder – if we needed one – that “art” which disregards classic aesthetic considerations will struggle to lift the human spirit  (art historian, Elizabeth Lev, lamented that the crib lacked the classic traits of beauty – grace, proportion and luminosity – that we find abundantly elsewhere in St Peter’s).

Wallowing in Addictions and Obsessions

The Christian concept of freedom, unlike licence, is not so much freedom “from” as freedom “for” – the freedom to live the kind of existence under God for which I was created. It also involves freedom from oppression, coercion, and so on, but the Christian notion of freedom goes far beyond politics to the moral issue of the capacity of a human being to overcome egoism and to live a life of love. This kind of freedom was possessed completely by Christ though he was nailed to the cross.

The West, which from the time of the American revolution became the bastion of freedom in both the political and moral sense, has long been experiencing a catastrophic slide in moral freedom. Apathy and sloth are almost considered normal among high school students. Addiction to drugs and pornography are at a level never seen before in history. New dependencies, such as those associated with social media, are being registered in increasingly younger members of the population.

Where Did the West Lose Its Way?

There is no deception as seductive as one that has an element of truth in it. In fact, the biblical term “impure” refers to something good that had been blemished by the presence of some contaminant. Founded upon a balance of elements that can rightly be termed “good”, Western culture has become an “impure” culture in this biblical sense, perverting the relation of its foundational elements to disastrous effect.

As Pope Benedict XVI and others have pointed out, medieval European civilisation achieved a harmonious cooperation of the best elements of the Judaic-Christian, Roman, and Greek heritages: faith in God, the Christian moral worldview based on the inherent dignity of every person as a child of God, the use of reason, and the just application of the rule of law. Today, largely driven by the sexual revolution, these foundational pillars of the West have been eroded and set against each other to such a degree that the entire edifice of Western civilisation is teetering.

The Sexual Revolution Dismantled the Harmony of Faith and Reason

The reasons for the historic unravelling of the classic balance between faith and reason over the past five hundred years are many. Benedict XVI listed some of them in his Regensburg address – the Reformation’s disdain of Greek influence and an insistence on sola scriptura, the rise of empirical science and an accompanying rejection of “subjective” experience such as faith, among others – but the greatest motivating factor in our time has been the sexual revolution.

A culture that values sexual liberty over virtually everything else frantically seeks to isolate faith and reason from each other. Since faith refuses to deny the procreative aspect of the sexual act, it is essential for the sexual revolution that faith be reduced to a private matter with no repercussions for public morality.

Dictated by the Sexual Revolution

The irony is that principles arising from the Christian faith, such as the dignity of human life, are being relegated to the private sphere in Western society, whilst beliefs that foster the sexual revolution are upheld by the wider culture and enshrined in law as if they had a universality and truth of a superior kind. Let’s face it, unexpected pregnancies just mess up the lifestyle promoted by the sexual revolution, especially the lifestyle of “fathers” who have zero interest in taking responsibility for the creatures brought into existence by their egoistic behaviour.

If we really must use reason, then let our “reason” be guided by the things that matter to us: the elimination of “clumps of cells” that inconvenience my lifestyle or career. According to this approach, the clump of cells cannot be a person in the same evolved sense that I am a person. In the absence of a clear criterion of the exact moment when it becomes a person, we must assert that it possesses no rights at all. Elimination of this clump of cells, thus, is not tantamount to killing a person, but an everyday instance of “healthcare”.

Faith and Reason: Two Wings Upon Which the Human Spirit Ascends

It is not too difficult to see that the classic balance between faith and reason is vastly superior to this embarrassingly nit-witted discourse. Natural law makes it clear to us that every human life has inherent dignity and goodness. Even in the animal kingdom, the self-sacrificial protection by a mother of its young is an almost universal phenomenon. Divine revelation only bolsters this natural understanding with its disclosure that each one of us bears the image and likeness of God. Reason, then, is placed at the service of this noble principle, and the result is the coherent Catholic moral teaching around pregnancy. If a mother’s life is in danger, the Church agrees that it is permissible to take therapeutic action that could, indirectly, endanger the life of the foetus, so long as no other alternative course of action is available, and so long as the life of the foetus is not directly targeted. Compare this humane employment of reason – directed towards the preservation of the lives of mother and child – to the malformed “rationality” that is the modus operandi of organisations like Planned Parenthood.

St John Paul II, in Fides et Ratio, wrote that faith and reason are the two wings upon which the human spirit ascends to God. The modern manifestation of Western culture seeks to separate these two elements and make them antithetical to each other, domesticating the faith on one hand, whilst, on the other, employing a caricature of reason at the service of the dictates of the sexual revolution.

Secular Civilisation- Losing the Capacity for Reason

Even a cursory look at what qualifies as “rational” discourse on such topics as abortion, same-sex marriage or gender theory will show that a worrying proportion of politicians, media figures and people in the street have lost the capacity to employ reason in the right manner. The “right manner” consists of that balance, spoken of by St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, between the foundational elements that make for a humane civilisation.

As has often been recognized, the notion that all people are equal arose historically from the Judaic-Christian belief that every human being – no matter how small, poor or sick – bears the image and likeness of God. Modern liberal culture adheres to a deficient version of the principle that all people are equal, rejecting the faith-inspired belief that this refers to everyone, and asserting instead that some people are more equal than others. Until a child emerges from the birth canal, in fact, he doesn’t qualify as a person at all.

The incredible thing is that vast numbers of intelligent and sophisticated people in Western democracies passionately adhere to this completely irrational principle. Many of the same people do genuinely care about things that they should care about, like the plight of immigrants, but their reason is blighted because it is not guided by that faith-inspired principle that is the foundation of modern humanism.

Both Sides Think They Have the High Moral Ground

It is difficult to have a conversation nowadays about this slide into the culture of death. As became even clearer during the US presidential campaign, religion and politics are no longer subjects for polite family conversation, such is the level of polarisation that has arisen. It is the very impurity of Western civilisation, in the sense of a mixture of good and bad elements, that makes the conversation difficult. Those on the left and those on the right both emphasize certain “goods” to the exclusion of all else. This gives rise to the conviction on everyone’s part that they have the high moral ground and the other side is deluded.

The fact that certain good elements are emphasized by secular western democracies gives them a sense of righteousness. Self-realisation and personal freedom are genuine goods. Therefore, I should have the right to do with my body as I please, marry who I please, and end my life when I please. The Christian vision of the inviolable dignity of the human person is rejected in favour of an approach to morality that values individual self-realisation above all else.

The West Must Rediscover Faith or Say Goodbye to Civilisation

By driving a wedge between faith and reason, the West has become a culture of death, a parody of its former self. Our children are taught to be profoundly narcissistic, holding firmly to irrational ideologies like gender theory, parroting Orwellian statements about “healthcare” and passionately committed to projects like “saving the planet” that – conveniently – will not hamper the unbridled licence of the sexual revolution.

When the West lost its rootedness in faith in God in the aftermath of the French revolution, the tyrannies of the twentieth century were prepared and presaged. In our day, not only has the West lost its ability to reason, it has also lost confidence in the very existence of truth, relying instead to an ever-greater degree on sentiment and folly. The most worrying thing, however, is that the West has replaced a system based on altruism with a system based on egoism – the so-called “realisation” of the self – conceived exclusively in subjective terms.

This is the “dictatorship of relativism” spoken of by Cardinal Ratzinger in his last homily before being elected pope, a relativism “that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires”.

The West has sought to become the master of its own destiny by denying its dependence on God and usurping his position as creator and Lord. We have become judge and jury of who lives and who dies, what is counted as male and female, what constitutes a meaningful life. In St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus casts out “impure” or “unclean” spirits on no less than thirteen occasions.

Only by returning to God, by humbly accepting our position as creatures of a loving God, by handing him the reins and bowing in obedience to him, can our culture be saved. Lord, come to our aid! Deliver our civilisation from its impure spirit!

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18 thoughts on “Western Civilisation Is Possessed By an Impure Spirit”

  1. https://www.queenofthedivinewill.org/divine-will-resource-audio-library/
    The Divine Will revelations and trust in His Divine Will to counter the effects of our self will seems the best Act of Divine Mercy given for our times ; the themes and truths conveyed in both are very similar as well , yet find that the readings on the divine Will help to grasp the Divine mercy truth better . ‘ Prayer of holy persons far more powerful than all the evil in the world ‘ .
    https://www.queenofthedivinewill.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Little-Catechism-of-the-Divine-Will-1.pdf – another very good introduction into same .
    God bless !

  2. Pingback: MONDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit

  3. Nothing has advanced the sexual revolution more than classroom sex education in Catholic schools. Under the false premise that there is nothing wrong in graphically showing and telling children to joyfully accept unlimited nudity and the explicit depiction of sex acts including masturbation, fornication and sodomy, and 8 detailed methods of contraception, the imaginations, memories and minds of students are sealed to Satan. Students who undergo Sex Ed in Catholic classrooms are no longer Catholics nor children, psychologically and in terms of loss of sanctifying grace. With the very first obscene image, video or text, that the Sex Ed student is required to watch, he or she loses the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Thereafter, the student is left wide open and totally vulnerable to demonic onslaughts from obsessions to full-fledged possessions. Diabolical incursions into children’s psyches follow a neural pathway opened by the succession of sensory images imprinted onto their souls by the hardcore visuals which comprise Sex Ed curricula. No wonder so many Catholic children are ripe for Satanic possession and actual cases abound. All these heavily-viewed ”Exorcist” movies are churned out every year, quite profitably, because people have a harrowing sense that demonic beings
    can invade and take them over at will, in the most horrid ways. There is a general despair that devils win, because these Exorcist movies have sequels proving the evil spirits were never really defeated, and are back, more powerful and terrible than before, to torment previous victims and violently enter new prey, usually children and ‘tweens. Because Catholic schools systematically scandalize their students sexually, we are re-discovering what Saint Paul told us about the ”carnal mind” being ”enmity against God”. One of the tragic outcomes of the Fall and Original Sin is that carnal-mindedness, sensuality, is part of human sexuality, and, most unfortunately, predisposes us to feel enmity toward God. Nothing inflames in Catholic children this nexus of carnal mind and enmity-to- God than pornographic Sex Ed in parochial schools, Satan’s greatest triumph over the souls of the young.

    1. Is this in all or some CATHOLIC schools. I know curriculum in public schools is what you describe if in catholic curriculum also why go to a catholuc school please verify. So critical if true we are lost no hope at all

  4. Great article. I pray a lot asking God to end abortion. So many people can no longer have a reasonable conversation about it. One might not be able to talk about God and His right to life over all of us to certain people but we can always talk to God about those same people. Relying much on faith and trust in God as I am now elderly and disabled and can no longer pray and witness outside an abortion clinic.
    God help us.

  5. Thank you Brian. Yes, it is the reality of evil that is behind all the brokenness of the world. And to acknowledge that is not to be a “doomsayer” but to confess that we need a Saviour.

  6. Well put. Jesus did not come to save us from opinions, ideas, or cultural norms. Rather, He came to free us from the bondage put on us by evil in this world. If evil is not a personal reality with real effects on our everyday lives, then Christianity does not make sense and the New Testament accounts of possession and demons are all fabrications. Post-modern, Westernized societies no longer believe in objective morality, evil spirits, or evil at all (for the most part). Sadly, claiming to not believe in the real presence of evil does not make evil nonexistent. Jesus was born into the kingdom of darkness, ruled by the prince of darkness and father of lies, and He is our only hope for freedom.
    I’m glad that you wrote this – not just because it’s timely, but also because the brokenness of this world simply doesn’t make sense if there is no such thing as evil.

  7. “ Since the first discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious zeal have diffused among the savages of the Old and New World, humanities inestimable gifts have been successfully propagated; they can never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge , and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.”

    Since Gibbon’s ended his General Observations of the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West with this final paragraph, 300 years have passed. What it says to the doomsayers of every age is that the end is not near, that it’s never going to come. My advice is to watch more Star Trek next generation and less Fox news.

    1. 2 Peter 3
      New American Bible (Revised Edition)
      IV. The Delay of the Second Coming
      Chapter 3
      Denial of the Parousia. 1 This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you; through them by way of reminder I am trying to stir up your sincere disposition, 2 to recall the words previously spoken by the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and savior through your apostles. 3 Know this first of all, that in the last days scoffers will come scoff, living according to their own desires 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? From the time when our ancestors fell asleep, everything has remained as it was from the beginning of creation.” 5 They deliberately ignore the fact that the heavens existed of old and earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God; 6 through these the world that then existed was destroyed, deluged with water. 7 The present heavens and earth have been reserved by the same word for fire, kept for the day of judgment and of destruction of the godless.
      8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day. 9 The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard “delay,” but he is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be found out.
      Exhortation to Preparedness. 11 Since everything is to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought [you] to be, conducting yourselves in holiness and devotion, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved in flames and the elements melted by fire. 13 But according to his promise we await new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
      14 Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace. 15 And consider the patience of our Lord as salvation, as our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, also wrote to you, 16 speaking of these things as he does in all his letters. In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.
      V. Final Exhortation and Doxology
      17 Therefore, beloved, since you are forewarned, be on your guard not to be led into the error of the unprincipled and to fall from your own stability. 18 But grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory now and to the day of eternity. [Amen.]

    2. A very accurate and insightful writing. However, it seems there is much more than an ‘impure’ spirit that Western Civilization is currently oppressed by; it is a satanic spirit; full force demonic. This strong demonic sprit is manifested clearly by the ‘Transgender-Agenda.’ Indeed, it is taunting us.

      The Transgender Agenda seeks to destroy your children, your family, Christianity, and your Nation. Satan gains strong and swift traction in a society when that society strays from natural law and the universal truths of Jesus Christ. In that vacuum the spirit of Satan will flow into and seek to create, and then feed upon, on any un-Godly policy, practice, belief, in our personal lives and the life of a nation; and division, confusion, discouragement and violence will result.

      The evil, secular spirit can first manifest as a small fire in the form of the ‘pill’ in the 1960s and grow into the Abortion fire of the 1970s, the Homosexual ‘Pride’ agenda of the 1990s, the Homosexual, un-natural ‘marriage’ fire of the early 2000s, into the out of control massive fire of the Transgender Agenda that is now consuming western societies.

      Transgenderism simply has to be the ultimate affront to Christ; even more so than abortion. It has to be the ultimate act of pride and self idolatry. ‘F.U. God !! I will determine my own Gender !! I reject the image of YOU, my God in me, I reject the image of Family you installed and modeled when you became a human and chose to do so though the womb of a human woman and not simply appear one day in the marketplace or town square as 25 year old or 30 year old; But to specifically arrive on earth through a human womb and by doing so reinforcing the Godliness of the Human Family Unit.

      Now the evil fire of the Transgender Agenda that does seek to consume your children, your church, your Nation is fast becoming out of control and its happening before our eyes. The President of the United States, Joe Biden, is rapidly advancing the Transgender Agenda and its being instituted all the way from the White House down to the smallest School Board Committee. This evil force is all through Corporate America and Corporate Europe. In fact it is in your own family with your lukewarm ‘Facebook mom’ or ‘Facebook dad’ Dumb, secular middle- class suburbanite that just want to go a long to get a long and not be ‘mean’ to anybody. Their down-fall is the belief that is also the same throughout the rest of modern western culture; that is; that there are THREE forces in the real world.
      However, in the real world which is the SPIRIT world and not the material world there are only TWO forces; Christ and the Satan – unequal but opposing. There is no Neutral, no third force wherein facebook mom and dad can rest comfortably and not try to correct or guide their 21 year old daughter living with the boyfriend or the nephew that might be ‘questioning’ his gender.

      So into the vacuum the evil fire comes stringer and stronger and it is designed to overwhelm us, confuse us, and scare us. In the United States we have been subjected to this in the past weeks; The anti-catholic catholic President Biden issuing directives advancing the transgender agenda in the Military forces, throughout all US Government Federal Agencies, in College and High school sports , in elementary school curriculums, in areas that we do not know of yet and likely never will.

      We watch stunned in amazement that it is now an official policy of the United States Government to promote the Transgender Agenda that gender is ‘fluid’ , is subjective and it can be ‘changed’ ;’ that a boy is not really a boy but can be a girl and a girl is not really a girl but can be a boy and that all the boys and girls can can change their gender when they want and in fact be NON GENDER as well.
      Could there be anything more demonic and from the bowels of Hell than such confusion and lies ?

      Because American and European Christians (Catholics) have become so lukewarm and secular and fat and happy with their bread and circuses; the evil fire has moved so fast that we are now here with a garden hose as the 20,000 acre wild- fire approaches our modest little house..
      For us believers we hope its not too late but sort of know it is too late. The offense of Transgenderism to Christ is indeed too much for his holy forbearance and mercy.

      We are left to wonder what necessary purifying chastisements Christ will be forced to visit upon us; His western- world spoiled creatures created in his image but who became fat and happy in our rationalism and secularism and not realizing there are only TWO forces and no neutral third force and slowly slipped into the firm grip of Satan.

      We have been warned for the last 2000 years to be viligent and not to be seduced by satan. God became a Man and let us murder him to protect us and give us the weapons to protect ourselves from evil; but now rich powerful western Nations turn their face from Christ as a matter of POLICY.

      It seems events are commencing that manifest Jesus Christ’s warning to us as given through many approved Catholic Saints and Mystics; ‘Woe to you, Woe to you three times for what you have done.’

  8. Hasn’t all of mankind been “fallen” since Adam and Eve listened to Satan in the Garden of Eden? Thus, we are all in need of a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.
    If you look at Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah, the Book of Revelation, and other portions of the Bible, it would seem that God’s plan doesn’t deliver us from the impure spirit roaming the earth until Jesus returns.
    But we all need to seek Him before it is too late.

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