In church today Baz had an anecdote about a school in Hamilton, where it is dank and depressing most of the time. There is a private school that used to be in the country, but as the city has grown it has become surrounded by working class suburbs. One of the moves the chaplain did was to get the kids to start serving in the local primary schools

And the amount of self harm and self-hatred (Baz said “I don’t want to call this depression because there are too many mental health professionals in the room” decreased.

But I don’t live in that school. I live in a socialist environment, where Christ is called irrelevant at best, and evil at worst. Those who follow hip, those who pour out their lives for others are called mad. We are supposed to have “boundaries”.

But I wonder if we are coding for selfishness. For it is people who will be in the life everlasting. Not our possessions, not our politics, and not our fears.

Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.

“Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”

(Mark 3:20-30 ESV)

But we fear. We worry. Some of this is useful: if one has deadlines and exams the fear of failing and repeating the year may drive us to work. But much of it is not. This world wants us to fear: to be anxious about all things.

When there are but a few things we should be anxious for: our love of God and our love of those around us, beginning with our families and congregation.

Let the world call us mad. They called Christ a minion of the devil. They will call us evil.

But you can judge them by the results of their ideologies. Progressive Fabian socialism has now had a fair test. And it has failed.

Cardinal Sarah has asked how many will have to die before Europe opens its eyes to reality. My answer to this is: very many, but Europe will most certainly open its eyes in time to avoid the worst.

We see here two forces at work: on the one hand, the desire to go on with the effeminate “peace and love” ideology with which one and a half generation of Europeans has been indoctrinated and which is so dear, warm and comfortable to them. On the other hand, reality.

The cognitive dissonance is making itself heard here and there, but still there is enough stupidity around for the majority of people to make excuses. Unavoidably, this will cause a worsening of the situation, until the high water of reality overcomes the dams of easy rhetoric and dear illusions of indefinite peace, without ever having to defend it.

We have a great advantage in the upcoming fight: that Islam is too savage a religion to allow for coordinated, disciplined mass deception. The scenario in which 100,000 Islamists behave like perfect citizens and patiently, orderly, silently wait for the day they start terrorising a Country all together is not realistic. Rather, the radicalization will always lead to a number of uncoordinated, more or less spontaneous attacks. I doubt the ISIS could stop a 21 years old idiot lusting after his alleged 72 virgins. I even doubt they would want to. This is a religion of bloody savages, not of Machiavellian strategists. They will always prefer a massacre today to an attempted coup d’état in twenty years’ time.

Every one who is slaughtered opens the eyes of one thousand who weren’t. The process will be slow, but unstoppable. And as more and more gets slaughtered, more and more will open their eyes to reality and start voting accordingly. Slaughtered priests (and in time, unavoidably, bishops and cardinals) will cause an even greater awakening. There is no way anyone can stop this.

There there is the other aspect of uncoordinated, spontaneous attacks: they go against the wrong crowd. If the Islamists would decide to only massacre Christians, this would allow the army of atheists to keep deluding themselves. But they don’t. They massacre perverts fifty at a time. They attack people in casual situations, like in a train. They attack masses celebrating purely secular feasts like Bastille Day in France. Soon, atheists and perverts will discover that Islamists attack them, too. Watch the rhetoric of “tolerance” whither and die, then.

Of course, this is not going to happen overnight. A huge wheel must be put in motion here, and an enormous inertia will have to be overcome. But once it has taken some speed, this is a wheel no Merkel, no Hollande and no Francis will be able to stop.

We need a safe base, and that should be our churches. We cannot have any time or agreement with those who would be so tolerant to let in those who would destroy our teaching, no more that we would let a thief steal the seed corn.

And our churches may again have to be storehouses. Of knowledge, of food, of love. The world is turning to hatred and division. From this we must separate.

For the one thing we should fear is that we die in rebellion from God. That we die rejecting Christ and his work for the forgiveness of our sins. To quote St Augustine, particularly on the issue of the phrase about blasphemy of the holy Spirit — and those who doubt on this should read and meditate on the entire sermon.

Against this gratuitous gift, against this grace of God, does the impenitent heart speak. This impenitence then is “the blasphemy of the Spirit, which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” For against the Holy Spirit, by whom they whose sins are all forgiven are baptized, and whom the Church hath received, that “whosesoever sins she remits, they may be remitted,” does he speak, whether in the thought only, or also in the tongue, a very heinous and exceedingly ungodly word, who “when the patience of God leadeth him to repentance, after his hardness and impenitent heart treasureth up unto himself wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to every man according to his deeds.” This impenitence then, for so by some one general name may we call both this blasphemy and the word against the Holy Ghost which hath no forgiveness for ever; this impenitence, I say, against which both the herald and the Judge cried out, saying, “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand;” against which the Lord first opened the mouth of the Gospel preaching, and against which He foretold that the same Gospel was to be preached in all the world, when He said to His disciples after His resurrection from the dead, “it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His Name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem:” this impenitence, in one word, hath no forgiveness “neither in this world, nor in the world to come;” for that repentance only obtaineth forgiveness in this world, that it may have its effect in the world to come.

But this impenitence or impenitent heart may not be pronounced upon, as long as a man lives in the flesh. For we are not to despair of any so long as “the patience of God leadeth the ungodly to repentance,” and doth not hurry him out of this life; “God, who willeth not the death of a sinner, but that he should return from his ways and live.” He is a heathen today; but how knowest thou whether he may not be a Christian to-morrow? He is a heretic to-day; but what if to-morrow he follow the Catholic truth? He is a schismatic to-day; but what if to-morrow he embrace Catholic peace? What if they, whom thou observest now in any kind of error that can be, and whom thou condemnest as in most desperate case, what if before they end this life, they repent and find the true life in that which is to come? Wherefore, Brethren, let also what the Apostle says urge you to this. “Judge nothing before the time.” For this blasphemy of the Spirit, for which there is no forgiveness (which I have understood to be not every kind of blasphemy, but a particular sort, and that as I have said or discovered, or even as I think clearly shown to be the case, the persevering hardness of an impenitent heart), cannot be taken hold of in any one, I repeat it, as long as he is still in this life.

And let it not seem absurd, that whereas a man who perseveres in hardened impenitence even to the end of this life, speaks long and much against this grace of the Holy Spirit; yet the Gospel has called this so long contradiction of an impenitent heart, as though it were something of short duration, “a word,” saying, “Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.” For though this blasphemy be long continued, and made up of, and drawn out at length in very many words, yet it is the manner of Scripture to call even many words “a word.”

We worry overmuch about the storms that occur in this time. It is true that there are some things we need to concern ourselves with, but much of the far and panic that is mentioned in social media or on the nightly news, or in our newspapers, is ephemeral. Tomorrow it will disappear, it will be worthless.

But people are not. The faith is not. Truth is not. Beauty is not,

Those things we need to seek. The elite want us to instead hate and celebrate lies, ugliness and oath-breaking.

Do not do as they preach. Do not count on them to rescue you. Their time will pass quickly. I have seen three or four elites so far, and I am not yet old.

Do not fear them, and do not be like them.