Society is going through a terrible crisis. Darkness has taken over the world. Today, after 80 years, the words of Donos Cortes, that prophet among diplomats, words that caused a sensation in Europe at the time, have come true:
My lords,” he said, “I am firmly convinced that we are entering a period of great oppression. Everything testifies to this: the blindness of the intelligentsia, the excitement of minds, pointless dissertations, groundless assaults and, above all, the lust for economic reform. If this lust, which has gripped everyone, hijacks souls as well, as is happening now, it will be a sure sign of great catastrophes and great collapse.Both simple reason and the research mind see the horror of a terrible crisis and collapse such as mankind has not yet experienced. Only the Catholic Church can save society.But the Catholic barometer points to a storm. The value of Catholic ideas has declined in almost all countries. One priest, asked if it was possible to spread a certain Catholic book in a Catholic country, replied that it would be understood only by Catholics who are Catholics. The answer more than witty.Under the influence of Protestantism, liberalism, socialism and modernism, the disappearance of Catholicism in our souls.
Let’s be honest. The ground is removing under our feet.The earth is trembling.The sky is coated with black clouds.The storm is approaching.Great fear has fallen upon the nations in anticipation of things to come.Pessimism is triumphing. A veritable epidemic of despair is gripping more and more Catholic spheres. Faith in many souls is undergoing a severe crisis. It seems – I repeat – it seems that God has fallen asleep since 1914, that He is deaf and dumb and lame.They mock us, saying: stop shouting, stop praying, God is dead, you will not wake Him up anymore!
Small-mindedness has become the sin of nations. Everywhere we meet people, looking through black glasses.Even under the mask of bold optimism gnaws all too often the wraith of doubt in God and the Church..Compromise, “maintaining states”, would not find so many partisans among us, if not for such a generally widespread belief that with God alone you can no longer prevail.
Down with pessimism! Man, looking through black glasses, is dangerous for religion. Perhaps he is the real religious danger. Therefore, we advocate optimism. And we add in advance, supernatural optimism, which is a component of our Creed, not based on mammon, power nor organization. These are rafters, auxiliaries, not foundations. We believe in the victory of the Catholic cause, because we believe in God. And the source of this never-failing supernatural optimism is the first article of faith.
The God of contemporaries is constitutional inertia, including political systems and majority decision-making in parliaments. God has lost the state and can rejoice if governments deign to put the name of His , “foreigner” at the head of legislation. He has become the God of shrines. He is forbidden to enter city hall, the thresholds of factories and schools. This is what the liberal world has decided. We have become diminished and impoverished because our concept of God has become so small. What God – such His followers: dwarfs and zeros. All our modern religious, political and social errors come from this miserable free-thinking notion of God. Speak to us again about the ancient God of the Bible, the God of primitive Christianity and the Middle Ages, the God of Hosts – and we will be saved.
Speak to us of the Mighty One, the All-Powerful One, the All-Knowing One, of streams of strength flowing through the world, of God speaking in the noise of waterfalls, amidst lightning and thunder, and we shall be a people of heroes!
Show us a God who fills the soul with joyful strength, creates suns, performs miracles, shatters wayward nations along with their governments like pottery vessels! Show us a God who, with an indulgent smile, passes over the madness of men and with his divine , “coups d’etat” attains his rights, and we will renew the face of the earth.
The question of healing the nations is therefore first and foremost a theological one, and only then a question of money and bread. We had to fall so low. And we must, if possible, fall even deeper – from precipice to precipice.
For a century, liberalism with its false notion – of politics for politics’s sake – and economics for economics’s sake – has forbidden God to meddle in these areas of social life. God, in order to beat down political and economic liberalism, had to withdraw from the ministry of external affairs as well. God punished liberalism – according to de Maistre’s inspired words – as he created light – with one word. He said: let it be done! And the political world collapsed into ruins. The accidents of the past years are just a public reading of the existence of God and negative evidence that Providence is guiding humanity. Political and social errors could only be corrected by this indirect apologetic view teaching.
I have never been more optimistic than I am today in the face of this widespread ruin.I have never recited the Creed with more conviction. The era of the modern God is coming to an end. Our God is resurrected! And when the passion week of world bankruptcy with its Good Friday is over, our God, the God of the Bible, the God of omnipotence and love, the Catholic God will once again be the God of the nation. After anarchy – theocracy! The first article of faith will again become the foundation of laws.
A deaf-mute wrote in an optimistic confession of faith: I believe that we have a sacred duty to lift ourselves and others up. For this, it is necessary that Catholic thought, the thought of God will again become the focus of all things. Proudhon is right: it is strange that at the bottom of our politics we always find theology. The day that politics and the economic self unite again with theology, the sun of optimism will rise over our mountains.
Ks. Robert Mäder – Katolikiem jestem!. Księgarnia Świętego Wojciecha w Poznaniu. 1929.
Catholic during the Great Apostasy 
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