Catholic during the Great Apostasy

Emptiness – nameless, unreflective, thoughtless, silent – is the ultimate state you are heading toward, driving straight down the highway, directly to hell. You don’t know whether it’s apathy, depression, or perhaps thoughtlessness in its classic form. Moral, social, or any other values cease to matter. Why? Good and evil no longer exist, and the former grayness transforms into nothingness. There is no moment of reflection – there is simply nothing. The state of emptiness is hard to describe, partly because it takes a miracle to escape it. In my opinion, only God’s intervention can pull a person out of this state.

The description I present is based on my experiences from the time of my conversion. It doesn’t always have to look like this, because God knows us perfectly and tests us in ways we can bear. However, it can be assumed with high probability that emptiness has one common trait – it is the final stage of enslavement, achievable only after completely rejecting God. A soul filled with nothingness drives the mind to a state where a person ceases to function normally. Deep apathy is no longer even depression – in this state, a person becomes useless even to the system, as they no longer respond to stimuli transmitted by the media.
That’s why other religions, unrelated to Christianity, are so heavily promoted. The world realizes that the soul cannot remain empty – it must be filled with something. The garbage transmitted by the media only works when the soul believes in something. The Masonic principle promoting faith in an unspecified “Great Architect” is a striking example of this. So-called atheists claim they don’t believe in any god. Why, then, do they exhibit such aggression toward Christianity, often tolerating other religions? Hatred is not atheism, nor is it rational thinking – which is mistakenly equated with it. Faith in oneself or humanism isn’t atheism either. Humanism can create beautiful slogans in the name of which people kill each other. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” – there are perhaps no more beautiful words, yet nothing has claimed more victims than the revolutions sparked in their name.
No one who hasn’t experienced the abandonment of their soul by God can imagine it, let alone describe it in words. St. Gregory the Great wrote:
“When a man turns away from God, his soul is left abandoned in a wasteland where no virtue grows”
(Moralia in Job, Book X, Chapter 7, my translation).
Yet even if you live in a lie, God still waits and is present in your soul, though it seems to you that you don’t see Him, that He isn’t there.
When nothingness and emptiness arrive, you could understand it – but you no longer feel anything. This is the moment when your life hangs in the balance – the last chance to see God’s helping hand. Minds cluttered with the world’s propaganda, media, and ideologies cannot perceive what is obvious.
Three years of my near-total disconnection from the world and media allowed me to see the Truth and be pulled out of hell. Though the conversion itself was a dramatic experience, today, years later, I realize that God opened me to the Truth. It may seem like a small thing, but it is an infinitely great gift, for we are all blind. St. Augustine, describing his conversion, wrote:
“Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You. And behold, You were within, and I was outside, and there I sought You”
(Confessions, Book X, Chapter 27, my translation).
To be born anew, you must descend into the abyss. St. John of the Cross wrote:
“The soul must pass through the night to reach union with God”
(Dark Night of the Soul, Book I, Chapter 1, my translation).
This is a general principle accompanying conversion – whether that state lasts an hour or years. Helplessness is a very apt description. I saw my own end, I looked at the enormity of my spiritual failure, and I was so utterly helpless that it turned into indifference. But how many of us know that few return from such emptiness?
The general principle of the faith handed down to us by our Lord Jesus Christ rests on the awareness that only a few find the way. This is so important, yet we so often forget it. We immerse ourselves in emptiness, thinking it’s blissful ignorance, and we feel an eternal thirst for the lies fed to us by the world – media, propaganda.
“I will give you the water of life, and you will thirst no more,” says Christ. Drinking from the source of Truth, you feel no thirst. Lies fuel more lies – an eternal thirst that nothing can quench, except the Truth.
How many have seen God’s helping hand? How many have rejected it? Few have noticed it, and of those few – how many did not squander the gift they received? How many, after being healed of spiritual blindness and freed from the leprosy of this world, thanked God? The answer to these questions is always the same: few.
The abyss of nothingness and vanity – that is us, humans. If God abandons us, that’s all that remains. Or perhaps more precisely – if we reject Him. The fact that someone has seen God’s helping hand doesn’t mean they are chosen. Absolutely not! It’s a great grace, but one must persevere in it and thank God – here, too, the principle of “few” applies.
Those who have been pulled out of hell, that is, born anew, can look at faith from a different perspective – free from the baggage of generational rituals that, upon closer inspection, have little to do with the Gospel. There are many such examples – from St. Paul the Apostle to converts like Robert Hugh Benson. It may seem strange, but let us recall the words of our Lord Jesus Christ about the necessity of being born anew, that is, of conversion and acknowledging one’s sins. Unfortunately, people show distrust toward the converted because they themselves believe they don’t need to convert. A lack of humility, or even pride, leads them to ruin. These are the paradoxes of faith that the converted perceive.
St. Paul, one of the most famous converts, often emphasizes in his letters the necessity of acknowledging sins, rejecting pride, and returning to God. His dramatic conversion (Acts 9) is a symbol of descending into the abyss and being born anew. In the Letter to the Galatians (6:3-4), we read:
“For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.”
Robert Hugh Benson, an English convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, addressed the theme of spiritual emptiness and the necessity of conversion in his works. In his novel Lord of the World (1907), he presents a vision of a world rejecting God:
“To him, ‘God’ was the evolving sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His nature”
(Lord of the World, Chapter I, my translation).
People who think they don’t need to convert fall into lukewarmness and pride, which leads them to ruin. The converted see this more clearly because they themselves have passed through emptiness.
A person who sees no need for conversion lives in the illusion of their own righteousness. Pride blinds them to the Truth, and their soul becomes a wasteland where there is no room for God.
A lack of humility and distrust toward the converted stem from blindness. Spiritual emptiness is tied to sin, and acknowledging one’s sins leads to breaking free from it – to conversion. The lower a person falls, the greater the faith that awakens in them. The testimony of conversion often leads such a person not only to believe but to know with absolute certainty. Unfortunately, they are often met with suspicion by most – because they were once an occultist, a Mason, or an abortionist. This is the greatest paradox of contemporary Christianity, which is based on conversion yet filled with people who think they don’t need it.
They treat emptiness like a disease, such as depression, unaware that even science confirms the beneficial impact of faith in such cases. A meta-analysis, “Religion, spirituality and mental health: Results from a meta-analytic review,” covered 444 studies from various countries, examining the relationship between religiosity and mental health. The results showed that in 61% of cases (271 out of 444), religiosity was positively correlated with better mental health.
My conviction that a person cannot live and function normally while experiencing such emptiness is based on my own example. It may not be true for everyone, because I had been living disconnected from the media for several years before experiencing emptiness – now it’s been exactly a decade. A soul fed by the system’s lies may not even realize the state it’s in.
Looking from the outside at the reality around us, one might conclude that this is indeed the case. People’s behavior is marked by spiritual emptiness. A lack of ability to make normal, rational decisions. Everything is based on what the media convey. The capacity for independent thinking has been reduced to a minimum. Even if someone thinks they’ve broken free from the system’s grip, they’re usually mistaken, because they’ve fallen into another channel – the earth is flat, lizard people, Trump and Musk are saviors, Putin is a symbol of freedom. The problem isn’t whether it’s true or false, but that these channels eventually loop back to the mainstream.
Emptiness, though it seems like the end, can be a beginning. My years after conversion show that cutting off the world’s lies and accepting the Truth is the only way for the soul to cease being a wasteland. Without God, we remain a shadow – with Him, we find life.
Step out of the current of the wide, rushing river of people racing toward their own ruin. Stand on the shore, look at life and the world from the sidelines as an observer, ask God to let you see clearly, and believe – and your faith will heal you. What you see will hurt, because the Truth hurts, but it doesn’t kill – unlike lies.
You will want to build a Church in your soul on the rock of your faith, and that Church our Lord Jesus Christ will never abandon!

Arkadiusz Niewolski