Guest Post: It's Time to Restore All Things in Christ

The motto of Pope St. Pius X was "To restore all things in Christ." Bring it on, Lord!

By Greg Diefenderfer

Looking back over the past 120 years at the tumultuous 20th century, two inflection points seem to stand out. One was World War I, which began 30 years after Pope Leo’s locution in 1884 and 3 years before Fatima. “The Great War” started the carnage that would eventually kill over 100 million souls. The second was the middle of the 20th century, when, seemingly out of nowhere, western Christian society started to go crazy. Compare anything you wish – music, TV, movies, education, clothing and dress, politics, economics, sexuality, your choice – and everything started deteriorating. We went from Doris Day and Frank Sinatra to Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, from Leave it to Beaver to All in the Family. And so on. What happened?
The short answer is that the Enemy happened. Pope Leo XIII heard satan ask for more power over his servants and 100 years to destroy the church, and our Lord gave it to him. Bl. Anna Emmerich saw, in her visions, that the gates of Hell were opened once again in the middle of the 20th century, after being chained shut during the time of the Church (Rev. 20: 1-3). All the demons were once again free to roam the earth. St Pio stated that, if we could see them, the sheer number of evil spirits would blot out the sun. Our Lady Herself stated to Mother Mariana in Quito, in the 16th century no less, that hell would be unleashed in the 20th century and many souls would be lost. Heresies would prevail, a spirit of impurity would saturate the atmosphere, and faithful souls would suffer a continuous and slow martyrdom, weeping in secret and imploring that such dire times be shortened.

Does any of this sound familiar?

But we should take courage, knowing that everything we’re now experiencing was pre-ordained by Our Lord. Our Lady also told Mother Mariana that Our Lord would grant great miracles in this time, and that we who are faithful would be the favored of His Heart. She also promised that She will be the one to crush satan under her feet: “This then will mark the arrrival of My hour, when I, in a marvelous way, will dethrone the proud and cursed satan, trampling him under My feet and fettering him in the eternal abyss.” No wonder the enemy hates anything to do with Our Lady. Can you imagine the proudest and most powerful angel being subject to a humble Virgin?

Our part is simple: just do what our Lady has requested at Fatima and elsewhere – rosaries of reparation, adorations, valid Masses, regular confession and First Saturday devotions. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Ignore the nonsense around us, it will pass away. Our Lord’s Will will certainly be done.

The Church was not immune to the carnage. Marxists and freemasons had been working since the 1920s to infiltrate the Catholic heirarchy. Here is a comparison of statistics from 1965 and 2015, a 50 year interval, taken from the Catholic Directory. By every measure the Church is worse off now than 50 years ago:

Priests: 

1965 = 58,632 

2015 = about 38,260. 

More priests aged 80 to 84 than there are aged 30 to 34.

Ordinations: 

1965 = 1,575 

2015 = 595

Priestless parishes: 

1965 = 549 

2015 = estimate a quarter of all parishes, 4,656, have no priest.

Seminarians: 

1965 = 48,992

2015 = 3,862

Sisters: 

1965 = 179,954

2015 = 49,480, over half over 70

Brothers: 

1965 = 12,271

2015 = 4,225

Infant Baptisms: 

1965 = 1,436,622

2015 = 708,979

Marriage: 

1965 = 352,000 

2015 = 151,364

Annulments: 1965 = 338 

2015 = +/- 45,000

Sunday Mass attendance: 

1965 = 65 percent

2015 = 23 percent

Catholics in the USA: 

1965 = 45,640,619; 

2015 = 71,128,395 

While there are more self-identified Catholics now than there were in 1965, the unfortunate fact is that the population of the country has grown much faster than the number of Catholics, so as a percentage, it has likely gone down. I might also add that the vast majority of Catholics these days are Catholics in name only and attend Mass seldom if at all. If you compare mass attendance now and in 1965, which I did not do, you'd probably find that the numbers have gone down. If not for all the Hispanics entering the country, we also probably would have lost membership over that time. They are the ones who are keeping the numbers up.

The only part of the Church that is consistently growing is made up of Latin Mass parishes, or those that practice a traditional form of worship, but these are a very small part of the whole.

We know the Church will survive, because it has Our Lord’s supernatural protection. But Our Lord never promised protection to each and every parish, diocese or clergy. There’s a saying that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.” If the Church seriously intends a Eucharistic revival, it could do nothing better than to trash the unnecessary liturgical changes of Vatican II and return to what worked before: tabernacles at the center of the altar, ad-orientem orientation by the priest, altar rails, communion on the tongue and reintroduction of male-only minor orders. That would truly revive the Church.