At the end of Joseph Roth’s epic novel The Radetzky March there is a moment when news of the assassination in Sarajevo comes through by telegram to one of the characters, a colonel, having been delivered by a footman. There is a party at the barracks. A long humid summer is about to break with a storm, and the end of an age is about to occur with the first World War. The footman reads the message he just delivered and reflects:
“The footman made a metaphysical connection between the sudden storm and the terrible news. It seemed to him that the hour was finally come when the supernatural forces of the world would appear in their full viciousness and unmistakeableness. And, holding the candlestick in his left hand, he crossed himself.”
The scene and this moment is shockingly apposite today. We might not express it in such a religious way, but who is not expecting ‘The Event’? It might be a global economic collapse, stock market crash, currency collapse, war, environmental catastrophe, or something entirely unexpected, but it is hard to shake the feeling that something is coming. Surely only the most naive and blindly optimistic are expecting a return to normal soon.
The thing that many people do not have is eyes of faith by which to see the supernatural dimension of world history and the present moment.
If you don’t have faith then you can be swept up and dashed about by the swirling chaotic forces of the world, and you can be used by the demonic powers of the antichrist which are gaining ground, because you cannot get a sense of the gravity of the events that are happening.
It seems to me now unmistakeable that we are living at the end of an age. The terrible silence of the next few months is but the calm that will precede a storm of truly awesome proportions.
Pray often, make reparation for sin and offer sacrifices. Consecrate yourselves and your family to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
“Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual—and, after all, what is an individual?” With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. “We can make a new one with the greatest ease—as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself,” he repeated.”Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
I will not help to bring about a ‘new normal’ in which the covering of one’s face in public spaces, previously considered deeply symbolically subversive of the values of Western civilisation, becomes the first step in a process of dehumanisation and further atomisation of society. I utterly reject the brutish responses of people who say ‘it’s just a bit of cloth’, ‘get over it’, ‘just wear it’ and so on. I will say more later about the importance of symbolism here.
The elephant in the room, the unspoken assumption of mask-wearing and indeed all the other inhuman measures of the past year, is the notion that healthy people can spread a disease . This is an unusual assumption to make as it goes against all previous protocol – we assumed that we were not going to spread a disease if we had no symptoms, and there are good scientific reasons for believing this. Shedding of a virus happens when the person is coughing , sneezing and blowing their nose but far less when they are not. And the studies that have now been done into ‘asymptomatic spread’ back up this basic biological observation. There are much reduced and indeed often zero cases of transmission in asymptomatic people compared to symptomatic. Here is a study showing that even in household environments where transmission is higher, the transmission from asymptomatic people was 0.7, meaning that there is no relevant asymptomatic transmission in a public setting. This simple fact alone should be enough to make you seriously question why you wear a mask.
To those who think the first paragraph’s reason hyperbolic, I ask you to consider this: Given that we have had previous flu and other respiratory disease seasons (eg 2017-18) which approached or exceeded the death toll that we had from Covid, (even with a widespread flu vaccine) what would be a good enough reason, once we have started wearing masks, to ever take them off in the winter months? And if that is fine by you, then you are presumably happy to live in a world where normal face-to-face interaction becomes a thing of the past, where our public spaces, already palaces of sterility and consumerism, become further alienated from the human and the personal. I originally wrote this in October and since then it seems pretty clear that mask-wearing is here to stay.
Of course, if we were to actually follow the evidence on mask-wearing we can see weak or no evidence for their effectiveness, and in fact some evidence that cloth masks are unhealthy. But why not just look at the evidence in front of your eyes – currently (mid-October) in the UK, death rates fell from April to July with no mask-wearing, and then when masks were mandated in August they carried on falling, now masks are widespread, but infection rates are soaring as ‘cases’ of Covid rapidly increase. All around the world the data is the same – there is no meaningful correlation between mask-mandates and reduction in transmission.
Added to this there are many public health officials who completely reject the wearing of masks by the general public. There is not a monolithic set of science which points to the rationality of mask-wearing. One set of studies found that masks aerosolise the virus and thus help it to penetrate deeper into people’s lungs and be carried in the air for longer, whereas with no mask the droplets which carry the virus can fall out of circulation much quicker.
The usual response to this is, even if there is no evidence, well, what harm can it do? Better safe than sorry. Actually no. Because the calculation here is all made in a system within which the only real ‘harm’ is to physical health, and within which the health or otherwise of the soul cannot enter in as a factor.
There is no such thing as the health of the soul for the mechanistic technocrats running this show, because there is no soul for them. This world and its pleasures are all there is. And for most of us, the only really important value is the health of the body, which explains how fear of death was able to paralyse our societies. They were already zombie societies, having only the appearance of health, but simply lacking any inner vitality. All it needed was the right kind of nudge to push us into this collective self-harm.
We have roadmaps for this territory. Some countries have been here before, some in the relatively recent past. Ireland for instance:
“Slavery is a thing of the soul before it embodies itself in the material things of the world. I assert that before a nation can be reduced to slavery its soul must have been cowed, intimidated or corrupted by the oppressor. Only when so cowed, intimidated or corrupted, does the soul of a nation cease to urge forward its body to resist the shackles of slavery ; only when the soul so surrenders does any part of the body consent to make truce with the foe of its national existence. When the soul is conquered the articulate expression of the voice of the nation loses its defiant accent and, taking on the whining colour of com- promise, begins to plead for the body. The unconquered soul asserts itself and declares its sanctity to be more important than the interests of the body ; the conquered soul ever pleads first that the body may be saved even if the soul be damned. For generations this conflict between the sanctity of the soul and the interests of the body has been waged in Ireland. … In fitful moments of spiritual exaltation Ireland accepted that idea, and such men as O’Donovan Rossa becoming possessed of it, became thence- forth the living embodiment of that gospel.”
(The Man Called Pearse, D. Ryan, Chapter VII)
Our society is thoroughly rotten within. The West is a corpse with some rouge on its cheeks. We are now simply seeing the logical working out of the already existing slavery of our souls becoming embodied in our external material slavery. That is why this is a spiritual problem, a spiritual battle, and the only solutions will be spiritual:
I thus take the view that mask-wearing is riskier for the health of the soul of our society than not wearing a mask is for the health of our bodies. I thus object on conscientious grounds to wearing a mask, and my exemption is based on the fact that wearing one would cause me considerable distress when contemplating my own complicity in our collective slavery and the further degradation of the vitality of the soul of our communities.
This article from the New England Journal of Medicine actually says that masking’s chief benefit is symbolic, in that it grants a feeling of safety to those who wear one. It calls masks ‘talismans’. I believe this talismanic function is what makes some people happy to wear them. But the problem is a deeper and more disturbing symbolism lurks beneath.
The chief symbolic element of mask-wearing, as Jonathan Pageau points out, is as veil. It symbolises separation, even in its most basic medical function there is a narrative, which is that of separation from the other in order not to infect the other. It functions as a mini-lockdown, a token of our understanding that the virus is real and a threat, and therefore can be a token of our care for others. Thus not to wear one can be construed as ‘you don’t care about me and my health’. Some of the reactions I have got to not wearing a mask are best understood in this way.
But this is also a willingness to participate in a collective act of self-defacement, which can be weaponised to show up those who refuse to participate as granny-killers, reckless, uncaring. It has the effect of being a kind of upside-down humility, in which my own virtue in hiding my face can be a badge of pride. As time goes on we see more and more open hostility towards those without masks, which is a mark of the increasing confidence that the mask-wearer has in his own rightness and virtue. We see here a parallel to the mobs who roamed the streets of America last summer compelling members of the public to show solidarity with their ideals by raising a fist, their absolute surety of their own rightness on display.
The mask is also symbolic of the machine-age, the technocracy in which we live. Ernst Junger in a 1932 essay foresaw our age:
“It is no coincidence”, he writes, “that the mask is again beginning to play a decisive role in public life. It is appearing in many different ways … be it as a gas mask, with which they are trying to equip entire populations; be it as a face mask for sport and high speeds, seen on every racing driver; be it as a safety mask for workplaces exposed to radiation, explosions, or narcotic substances. We can assume”, he continues, with an eerie prescience, “that the mask will come to take on functions that we can today hardly imagine”.
In this sense as the article I linked to makes clear, we are in an age in which the mask is a symptom of the reduction of the human being to a functional object, with all non-essentials – everything that makes us human – eliminated. In this sense, I offer that the refusal to wear a mask represents Winston Smith’s point: “The object is not to stay alive, but to stay human”.
We can go further into the symbolism of the mask and ask what this reduction of the human being to a functional object means. Again Jonathan Pageau absolutely nails it. He points out that the mask, like the niqab, has the effect of giving anonymity, and of removing identity.
A Niqabi holds back her identity in the public sphere, because that is to be retained only by her husband and family. The free interaction and giving of self is not part of her public persona. Obviously the more frequent wearing of the mask in every public space has the effect of removing the human face from the public environment and thus removing what is most God-like from society. If the essence of the human being, its peak and culmination of all its powers is realised in the human face, then what is most essential to humanity is the divine image revealed by it. The devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus shows us this. The mask then enables the complete removal of God from the public space. And people wear them in church!
Until We Have Faces
Putting on masks is the equivalent of taking down statues. The purpose is to enter into a new identity by removing an old one. The masked face is a very apt symbol of the ‘New Normal’. Recognise this and resist. By refusing to wear the mask you signal that you will not participate in this destruction.
Last winter was hard. Every evening for months I would lay in bed and watch videos of the 2011 Japanese tsunami. They didn’t help my mood. I would lay in the dark with the roaring of the waters in my ears and the cries of the people as they watched their entire town being washed away in seconds. I couldn’t stop watching. In some of the videos the water is like a dark beast, absolutely implacable and unforgiving, out seeking vengeance for some terrible crime, I don’t know what.
They entered my dreams of course. How could they not, these fevered apocalyptic visions? But this had happened to me before, my tsunami dreams, except the last time I had not installed them into my unconscious through electronic means. Around the year 2000 I started getting recurring nightmares of an enormous wave engulfing my house and being powerless to do anything about it. The feeling of utter dread and sheer panic were very hard to shake when I awoke.
These dreams were still occuring when my wife and I moved to Thailand in 2003. On Boxing Day 2004, as I walked down to the beach one morning in Phuket, I suddenly knew the exact dread I had known in my dreams. At about 9.30 AM the first of several large waves, each larger and more powerful than the last, would smash onto the beach where we were staying with my parents. As it was happening my father and I were dragged by the water up the beach, and I genuinely believed I wouldn’t survive. I knew in that moment that without a shadow of a doubt my dreams had been pointing to this moment. Of course this was not just happening on our beach, but all over South Asia, an earthquake-triggered tsunami was killing a quarter of a million people, the largest natural disaster in human history. We were lucky, the waves were not strong enough where we were to kill us, but I was forever changed by that experience.
Nothing would feel quite as secure as before after this. Some of my certainty had been washed away. But I always remember my reaction to this and how I knew with certainty that this had been foreseen, and how I was going to warn others of its gravity. Certainly I had a difficult time persuading my wife and mother of the enormity of what was happening. We spent the rest of the day up a hill with others from the village, but it wasn’t until we went to the local town and news reports started coming in that it was clear that this was a tragedy of enormous proportions.
I have a similar feeling at the moment. All around, I can see people who are not looking clearly at the present situation in the Church and the world, and who are thinking of business as usual, but it is not. How do you go about warning them, without feeling like Chicken Little?
Also I think there is something more to the flooding and tsunamis. In 1980, when asked about the third secret of Fatima at Fulda in Germany, John Paul II said this:
“On the other hand, it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this: if there is a message in which it is written that the oceans will flood whole areas of the earth, and that from one moment to the next millions of people will perish, truly the publication of such a message is no longer something to be so much desired.”
This means firstly, that the whole third secret of Fatima has not been revealed, as the official third secret revealed in 2000 says no such thing. It also means the chastisements mentioned in other revelations may well be ahead, especially those of Akita. Certainly Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that the message of Fatima and the message of Akita are essentially the same.
At Akita Our Lady said: “If men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before.”
The news has recently surfaced that Sr Agnes Sasagawa, the 88 year-old nun at the centre of the Church-approved Akita apparitions and messages in 1973, has recently after thirty years received a new message from her guardian angel which you can read here.
It appears that the message of penitence (“put on ashes”) and prayer was given on October 6th, just hours after the pagan ceremony in the Vatican gardens. The reference to sackcloth and ashes is from the book of Jonah, and indeed in the message it directly mentions Jonah 3:6-10 which shows how God relented from the chastisement by the penance that the people did on the orders of the King of Nineveh.
Reading the book of Jonah I was struck by Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the whale:
“I called to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and thou didst hear my voice.
For thou didst cast me into the deep,into the heart of the seas,
and the flood was round about me;
all thy waves and thy billows
passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am cast out
from thy presence;
how shall I again look
upon thy holy temple?’
The waters closed in over me,
the deep was round about me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me for ever;
yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.
When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to thee,
into thy holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their true loyalty.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to thee;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”
It seems this prayer of Jonah has much to say to our situation right now.
One of the things which seems to be a connection is the link between Our Lady of Mt Carmel and the Fatima/Akita revelations. On Oct 13th 1917 at what is known as the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, Our Lady appeared to Sister Lucia under three different aspects. Firstly a tableau of the holy family appeared, then Mary appeared as Our Lady of Sorrows with Jesus, and finally she appeared as Our Lady of Mt Carmel holding the brown Scapular. She then revealed who she was to Lucia, as promised, as Our Lady of the Rosary.
Clearly these three apparitions are symbolic of the Joyful, Suffering, and Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary. The Holy Family are the subject of the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful mysteries symbolised by Jesus in red garments and Our Lady of Sorrows, and the Glorious Mysteries, in which Mary appears crowned and Glorious alongside Our Lord in Heaven, is aptly captured by the image of Mary as Our Lady of Mt Carmel, who appears crowned holding Her Son and with the scapular, assurance of our own ultimate participation in the Divine Life if faithful to the end.
In the time I was in Rome during the synod, I visited the Carmelite church, St Maria in Traspontina, where all the idols were and sacrileges were happening daily. I wish now I had been more outspoken against what was happening. I prayed a rosary and an act of reparation in front of the statue of Our Lady of Mt Carmel, placing the images I had created of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts at her feet.
I have decided to join in the 40 day prayer and fasting recommended by Fr Heilman at his website , I think it would be good for all Catholics to do this. There is so much at stake, and the waters are rising all around us.
I have recently been thinking about the collective nature of sin, and how, when societies fall away from a Christian ethic, there is a corresponding dimunition of personal sanctity on the individual level. Antony Esolen points out in this article (on Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Inscrutabili Dei) that families do not merely make up society like bricks make up a wall – but rather that each family is in itself a society, and that each Christian family is a domestic Church.
He says: “When domestic life is Christian, the members of that society of the hearth will learn the habits of piety and obedience and mutual service, “to the restraint of that insatiable seeking after self-interest alone, which so spoils and weakens the character of men.””
Who can deny that the insatiable seeking after self-interest alone has thoroughly infected society, individuals and thus families? Our characters have all been weakened by the unjust laws and constant flow of immorality which we collectively tolerate in the name of progress. My friend Roger Buck talks about the French Traditionalist criticism of hyper-individualism endemic to the English-speaking world. We are stronger together. But we cannot come together around ourselves, our communion with each other needs to be grounded firstly in our communion with a higher truth than that of our selves.
When we pray as a family we gather together around this higher source of unity without which our own unity as a family is impossible. We must create the space to do so, which is to say we must allow the order of space to impose a kind of discipline on time itself. In ancient cosmologies (explicated so brilliantly by Jonathan Pageau in videos such as this), Time took the form of a serpent which encircled space, and kept eating into it. This is an image of how chaos can overturn order, or how the revolutionary spirit seeks to overthrow order.
At a recent pilgrimage to Walsingham, Msgr Armitage asked the families there present to start praying the Angelus every day. This short prayer with its call and response could be the perfect way to begin to order the natural goods of the family to their eternal ends, and to create that holy fellowship which is a reflection of Christ and His Church.
Perhaps the life of the saints
strikes us as a sad one
because our notion of “a saint”
is a narrow and moralistic one.
But the saints are not those
who have followed all the rules;
they are not the ones
who have sacrificed all pleasure;
they are not the ones
who have cut out of their lives
everything and everyone except God.
No, they are the ones
who have abandoned themselves
to the wild adventure of being a lover of Jesus,
and have let the joy of that adventure
flow from them
to pervade their every action,
have let that love
infuse all of their relationships.
They are the ones who have found an eternal happiness
that can console us now
in the face of misfortune and disappointment,
and will one day
wipe away every tear in God’s kingdom.
The Door
They always come back to that
painting of Jesus holding a lantern
and knocking at a closed door,
as if it were completely new to us.
I mean, the fact that there is no handle
to open it from His side.
Well we’ve got the idea; the handle is
on our side for turning, if we want to, so
that He can come in. Yes, Mr Holman Hunt,
you got it right, straight from the book.
And in He comes, smiling, and we have supper
together. That is a happy ending.
In my topsy-turvy world, I’m outside
the door, on my knees waiting for just
a glimpse through a slit, of a new dimension
when He opens it. I swear I can hear Him
moving about, singing, making ready, together
with the Other Two for our banquet forever.
From ‘The Trouble about Not Writing Poetry’ by Sister Mary Stephen OSB of Minster Abbey.
Amor Deus publishing, June 2015.
ISBN 978-1-61956-480-0
With thanks to Father Sean Finnegan for sharing this.
This is from a comments section on a Catholic website:
A week from today is August 1st, the First Saturday in August. I suggest to anyone who hasn’t started making the First Saturday devotions to start this week.
Go to Confession some time this week and before you enter the Confessional make this intention: “Jesus, this is for love of you, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” Then go to Mass Saturday morning and make the same intention before receiving Holy Communion. Then say five decades of the Rosary with the same intention, and spend 15 minutes meditating on one or more of the Mysteries of the Rosary with again the same intention and offering. A great way to do this last one is to pick the Scripture passages that outline one of the Mysteries, say the Annunciation in Saint Luke’s Gospel and read through it in a quiet place slowly and meditatively out loud to yourself.
It isn’t enough to yell and scream and get upset about this stuff. We need to do things. And Our Lady gave us this gift of Communion of Reparation at Fatima and promised that if we could manage it for five months in a row that she, the Mediatrix of all graces, would provide us with all the grace that we need for salvation at the hour of our death. So let’s do it.
I have recently been thinking about the collective nature of sin, and how, when societies fall away from a Christian ethic, there is a corresponding dimunition of personal sanctity on the individual level. Antony Esolen points out 
The Immaculate Heart of Mary 