Often it seems that God does not exist:
all around us we see persistent injustice,
evil, indifference and cruelty.
—POPE FRANCIS, Evangelii Gaudium, n. 276
Another day. Another mass murder. It’s become so commonplace that massacres have become a “normal” part of our culture. Except there’s nothing normal about it. Even fifty years ago, mass shootings were utterly rare. When they occurred, they were the subject of deep collective thinking, numerous documentaries and public inquiries. Now, they’re simply part of the weekly news roll.
Major “sign of the times”
But there’s is something much, much deeper going on here. Whether it’s the continued Islamic butchering of Nigerian Christians or the North American slaying of school children as they pray in their pews, the words of St. Paul to Timothy are screaming off of the Bible’s pages at this hour:
…Understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days. People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God… (2 Tim 3:1-4)
Do I really need to list dozens of news stories and examples? No, you’re no doubt fully aware through your social media and the news that there is something terribly off in the collective and individual consciences of our times. Sure, there have been brutal cultures and generations in the past. What is different about our times is the near universal explosion of narcissism and the “me” culture. We have literally nurtured a culture of self-centeredness to the point where we are watching St. Paul’s admonition unfold in real-time, every day, on reel after reel of bizarre behavior utterly detached from any sense of moral compass. It is not only widespread lawlessness but the displacement of God by ego. Could this not be a foreshadowing of that other related passage of St. Paul’s?
[The day of the Lord] will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God... (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4)
The Antichrist is essentially the incarnation of ego — the summit of a “me” culture.
Culture: Shaping Narcissists
As we hit the newest film festival cycle this summer, we see that what is proposed as “art” and “entertainment” is really nothing but the next lowest level of gore, violence, and sexually explicit images — a level that has reached the very bowels of Hell. In fact, I’m incensed by it. Do we really think that the daily fare of violent video games, violent films, anti-Christian themes, and atheistic education doesn’t shape and inspire the minds of mass murderers like Robin Westman?[1]The 23 year old killer in the Minnesota Catholic school shootings. We would be utterly naive (deluded, rather) to believe so. And yet, as I read film critics raving over the latest demented film without even a hint of moral disgust, it’s clear to me that what Brazil’s Pedro Regis claimed to hear from the mouth of the Virgin Mary is utterly true:
You are living in a time worse than the time of the Flood, and the moment has come for your return. Do not fold your arms. Turn to the One who is your Way, Truth and Life. You are heading for a painful future. The enemies of God will act against men and women of faith. Many consecrated will retreat out of fear, and the pain will be great for you. You will yet see horrors on earth, but do not be discouraged, for I will be at your side. Bend your knees in prayer. Only by the power of prayer can you bear the weight of the trials that will come. Seek strength in the Eucharist and you will be victorious. —October 2, 2021
That message is far from a fatalistic viewpoint of humanity — it’s simply realistic: the more we harden our hearts, the more lukewarm the Church becomes, the fewer good men and women there are… the more lost humanity will become. It’s a simple spiritual principle:
Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit. (Galatians 6:7-8)
The New Reaping
It is hardly enough for us to read or recognize the “signs of the times.” Worse is to merely complain about it and beg God to strike evildoers down — hardly what Christ did; instead, He laid down His own life for sinners and his violent persecutors.
It is the vocation of every single baptized Christian to sow light into the darkness around them. The darker these times become, the more imperative it is that by prayer and fasting and by witness, we sow spiritual seeds around us. These are the seeds of resurrection sown in the tomb of our times.
But it is also true that in the midst of darkness something new always springs to life and sooner or later produces fruit. On razed land life breaks through, stubbornly yet invincibly. However dark things are, goodness always re-emerges and spreads. Each day in our world beauty is born anew, it rises transformed through the storms of history. Values always tend to reappear under new guises, and human beings have arisen time after time from situations that seemed doomed. Such is the power of the resurrection, and all who evangelize are instruments of that power. —POPE FRANCIS, Evangelii Gaudium, n. 276
After much deliberation this summer, I decided to throw my name in the ring to run for Councillor in my local County division. I decided it was time to stop complaining about politicians and their inaction, and get directly involved. It’s just a small political role… but here’s the point. If we Christians get involved in our local school boards and councils, we can be a voice of light and truth and help to guide the implementation or preservation of just laws. If we leave those decisions to a culture that has abandoned the Gospel, we get what is now being served up daily: the abandonment of right reason.
It is crucial that faithful Catholics become involved in the public sector. This, after all, was the vision of Vatican II. Not that every Catholic start a ministry or an apostolate — as good and necessary as these works may be — but that the laity are sowing the seeds of the Gospel in the marketplace and thus transforming the culture. This was…
John Paul’s distinctive vision of the priority of culture over politics and economics and his Vatican II-driven sense of the “public Church” as, essentially, the shaper of culture. —George Wiegel, First Things, February, 1998
As Cardinal Avery Dulles said, “if a consensus exists in favor of a healthy society, the implementation will almost take care of itself.”[2]Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “Religion and the Transformation of Politics,” in Church and Society: The Laurence; cf. https://archphila.org/address-in-toronto-law-and-morality-in-public-discourse/ The problem, said Pope Benedict, is that the moral consensus on what is founded in right reason and the natural law is now “collapsing.”
This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk… To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake. — cf. On the Eve
So we need two things — Catholics who are visibly and effectively practicing their faith at every level of society among their peers, workmates, families, and neighbourhoods, and faithful Catholics who get involved politically.
This summer, we’ve had a lot of days of drought up in our countryside. The grass was so dry, it was turning into powder. But alas, the rains finally came and the lawns and fields suddenly turned into green carpets! We cannot underestimate what a little rain, that is, the reign of Christ in us can bring to a parched culture. We cannot let faith and hope die in the face of love grown cold, as we see in the Timothy prophecy manifesting all around us.
There is a New Reaping coming — a New Pentecost. The popes have been praying for it; Our Lady, who was in the Upper Room at the first Pentecost, has been prophesying it. What is necessary is for you and I to be gathered in the Upper Room once again. This is why Our Lady has been incessantly calling us to form prayer cenacles, calling us to be centered on the Eucharist and engaged in “prayer and fasting.” In this way, we will become her extended hands to the world.
Fast, sacrifice yourselves, love out of love for God Who created you, and be, little children, my extended hands to this world that has not come to know the God of love. Our Lady of Medjugorje to Marija (with Ecclesiastical approval), August 25, 2025
Our individual love and sacrifices may not change the whole world. But they have the power to begin changing the world around us. That’s the little “talent” that we have been given (cf. Matt 25:14-30). May we not bury it in the ground out of fear, but in faithfulness so that the Lord may secure, through our cooperation with grace, one more stalk in the coming Harvest.
Related Reading
The Greatest Sign of the Times
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