World Trade Center - The Scourge of Sin

WTC – THE SCOURGE OF SIN

Winona, October 1, 2001

Dear Friends and Benefactors:

If ever there was a sign of the times, surely it was the cloud of smoke choking Manhattan after the terrorist attack of September 11th, and rising slowly into the New York sky from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Everything modern man believes in -capitalism, materialism, globalism - struck down and reduced to a lethal pile of smoking rubble! We pray for the souls suddenly appearing before God, and for their bereaved families. But there is every chance modern man will roll on into World War III.

That is a religious and not a political calculation. Man proposes, God disposes. On the political level, we can be virtually certain that the vile media will not tell us the full story. There is serious reason to believe--that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the "USS Maine"; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the "Lusitania" as a target; that in 1941 it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963 it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy. In 1990 it was certainly not Saddam Hussein who promised not to react if he invaded Kuwait. In 1994 it was certainly not Timothy McVeigh's van exploding outside the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City which brought the front of the building down. In 2001...? Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, now Osama bin Laden, from CIA-assets to personal enemies of the American people -how many more times will the trick work?

Politically, behind the Arab terrorists are most likely the would-be architects of the New World Order, who have long been using the United States as an instrument to achieve their control of the world. Long ago they planned three World Wars to achieve their aim. It is they who provoked the sinking of the "Lusitania" and the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring the USA into the first two. Now they seem to be using the Arabs also. Humanly, they are clever. They are even diabolically clever. But little do they realize that they are in turn mere instruments of God who uses them for the salvation of souls.

For the last fourteen hundred years Mohammedans, whether Saracens or Arabs or Moors or Turks, have served God as a scourge to punish faithless Christians, or slack Christendom. When Catholics are fervent, God can grant them miraculous victories over the Mohammedans, as at the sea-battle of Lepanto in 1571. When Catholics are slack, God can allow the very survival of their nations to be threatened, as now, by birth-rates in Europe, by terrorism in the USA. When Spanish Catholics were slack in the 700's, God allowed the Jews to betray Spain to the Arabs. When Spanish Catholics were truly Catholic, God granted them by 1492 to reconquer Spain from the Arabs, and then granted them to create a Catholic empire in the Americas. Either way, God writes straight with crooked lines for the salvation of souls.

The Jews are a similar case. As early as 200 the Church author Tertullian remarked that as Catholic faith goes up, so Jewish power goes down, while as Catholic faith goes down, so Jewish power goes up. In the Catholic Middle Ages the Jews we're relatively impotent to harm Christendom, but as Catholics have grown over the centuries since then weaker and weaker in the faith, especially since Vatican II, so the Jews have come closer and closer to fulfilling their substitute-Messianic drive towards world dominion.

If we return for a moment to politics, the United States is now caught precisely between these two scourges of God. Unquestionably one main grievance of Arabs against the United States, provoking their terrorists to lash out as we have seen, is the United States' one-sided favoring of Israel over the Arabs for the last forty years. But each time the United States attempts to act even-handedly towards the Arabs, Jewish power inside the United States - e.g. virtual control of finance and the media - blocks the attempt, and the United States returns to oppressing the Arabs.

This problem of the United States is politically insoluble, because it is a religious problem! The United States is caught between these two scourges of God, because it has turned away from God. God chastises those whom He loves (Heb. XII, 6), so that if God were not now chastising the United States, it would be the proof not that He loved, but that He did not love the United States! Let us be grateful that God is using Arab and Jew to chastise us! And let us therefore, with no thought of hating Arab or Jew, because they are NOT the real problem, turn to the real problem, which is the sins by which we offend God. Let us take the Ten Commandments in reverse order, culminating in the first.

10 By our materialism, the exciting of envy and love of money in all hearts. 9 By our internetted pornography, the rousing of mortally sinful desires of impurity on a global scale. 8 By our vile media, the lying and deceiving of north, south, east and west. 7 By our vicious financial system, the enriching of the hidden manipulators and the stripping the people of their land, inside and outside the United States. 6 By our national glorification of the "alternative life-style" (amongst multiple other crimes of impurity), our screaming to God for vengeance. 5 By our nationalized abortion, the slaughtering of innocents in life's sanctuary, the mother's womb. 4 By our incestuous individualism, the ruining of the family. 3 By our sport and supermarket Sundays, our scorning of the Sabbath. 2 By our Disneyland projection of God, our utter mockery of His holy name. And finally 1, worst of all, by our all-round liberalism, our setting up of man as God, our committing of total idolatry.

In truth, another main reason for the Arabs' hatred of the United States and of everything represented by the World Trade Center, is that with all their false religion, Arabs still have enough sense of the dignity of human life to scorn and loathe the cheap food, music and clothing, the culture of materialism, that has been spread all over the world - from the United States. Does such a loathing of trash justify suicidal terrorism? No, but it goes some way to explaining it. Man does not live by bread alone, still less by McDonald's, MTV and jeans.

But is the United States to blame for the rest of the world taking in its trash? Certainly not, and that is why God's punishment has surely started, but will surely not finish, with the September 11 attack on the United States. Abortion, to take an obvious case, is a world-wide crime, and that is why, short of a miraculous turning around on the part of mankind, God will surely allow all men to carry out what will be His chastisement of them by their own third World War. Actually the crimes of mankind are so great that not even a third World War may be enough for His purposes, which is why He has warned us of even worse. Let me remind you of what His Mother told us on Fatima Day, October 13th, 1973, in Akita, in northern Japan, through a humble lay sister, in a locution officially approved by the competent Catholic diocesan authority:

"My dear daughter, listen well to what I have to say to you. You will inform your superior. (A short silence). As I told you, 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 Flood in Noah's time, a punishment such as will never have been seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only weapons which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by my Son (It is not certain what that sign is). Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the pope, the bishops and the priests.

"The work of the Devil will seep into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals oppose cardinals, bishops against other bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their fellow-priests... Churches and altars will be ransacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the Devil will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord. The Devil will be especially merciless against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of my sadness (Her wooden statue in Akita wept real tears 101 times). If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them (no more access to the sacrament of Confession?). With courage speak to your superior. He will know how to encourage each one of you to pray and to perform works of reparation".

Dear readers, let us take the destruction of the World Trade Center as a great sign from God. It is not merely a human affair. If God wishes to punish, no human system of counter-terrorism, however ingenious, will succeed. If God wishes to protect, no terrorist will succeed. Of Fr. Wickens' two Traditionalist parishioners who worked in the WTC, one ran down some 70 flights of stairs and escaped from the North Tower eight minutes before it collapsed, while the other did not go to work high up the South Tower that day, because - he had a doctor's appointment!

The 6,000 who died, as Our Lord says, were not specially guilty, but we must all do penance, or we will perish likewise (Lk XIII, 4,5). Modern cities are fragile, as the terrorists have shown. Life is always fragile. Any of us can die at any time. "The readiness is all", the readiness of the state of grace to step into eternity. A great event like the fall of the WTC is a God-given warning. Let us pray steadily and constantly, and as Our Lady asked, perform above all our duty of state in reparation for the overwhelming sins of our poor, poor world.

Nor forget the Seminary in your prayers. Fourteen new seminarians for the moment, although some may not stay long. But that is still fourteen good hearts, ten of them from the United States. God bless America!

And may He bless you also, dear readers.

In Christ,