JOHN PAUL II MEETS MISANTHROPIC SATANISM AND EVERYTHING BECOMES BAD

It’s been such a shitty week for Catholics that they had to resort to both John Paul II and Armageddon in one go. If things get any more dire the protocols call for the pope to just hide in his hat until someone sounds the all-clear.

If you don’t keep strict tabs on the National Catholic Register–and for the love of Ba’al why would you?–I’m referring to last week’s editorial by Friar George Rutler.

Rutler is a New York priest who sincerely resembles a crash test dummy and specializes in alarmist pronouncements. In December he called the Catholic Church as a “theological Chernobyl” which I’m pretty sure is a line he stole from me.

Of course Rutler wasn’t referring to, say, the ongoing hellscape of sexual abuse scandals orbiting the Vatican like bloodsucking flies. That would be too normal. Instead he was just mad that Pope Frank criticized the death penalty. Maybe someone should tell the friar he can’t get death for touching kids, if that’s what he’s worried about.

 

 

Rutler’s latest piece appears under the gentle title, “Satan Kills Babies, Shatters Families, Corrupts Priests and Mocks the Church.” So obviously we should anticipate a thoughtful and nuanced perspective on current events.

“While other generations have known philosophical and physical conflicts, ours is conspicuous for an evaporation of moral certitudes,” Rutler repines.

Again, this would be a really great thing to say about his fellow priest’s habit of sticking it in everyone else’s cassock whenever there’s fewer than three people in the room, but oddly he never really brings it up.

Instead he apocryphates some more vagaries: “The Catechism is clear: ‘Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.'”

I assume this is not a reference to Notre Dame choking like a Peter Motteux at the Cotton Bowl. Although it damn well should be.

To be honest, the defensive grunting of an obscure New York priest who is only slightly less reactionary than the average Jenga tower doesn’t interest me much in itself.

It’s the part where he invokes the late and recently beatified John Paul II, the church’s most famous modern leader/child pimp to diocese worldwide, that caught my attention.

Rutler cites John Paul II’s speech in Philadelphia in 1976 declaring:

“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel, between Christ and the antichrist.”

Again this would be a great commentary on the Roman hands of Roman Catholic clergy the world over, but again Rutler defers. Which I guess makes sense, because if John Paul II didn’t feel the need to say anything in particular about priest abuse why should anyone else make much of a bother?

 

 

The fascinating thing about this quote is that it’s completely wrong. We are not in fact facing a final confrontation. This is a decisively non-final conflict. Was in ’76, still is today.

I guess it would be nice for Vatican types to imagine that Armageddon is nigh, since that seems to be the only thing that would actually put a stop to the constant predations of priests.

But I’m sorry, friar, Jesus is not going to ride in and cancel everything. You’re going to have to address these problems yourselves.

I think as Satanists we have to muster resolve for non-final conflicts and non-reckonings and the very realistic idea that life is naturally full of disputes and we’re going to have to address them on their own terms.

The friar shows us what happens otherwise: Vague, misty references to apocalypse but absolutely no actual reckoning with the real conflicts that are happening right now throughout the organization he’s a part of.

Some Satanists fall into this trap too, particularly those indoctrinated into nihilism and far-right politics. The Sweden-based Misanthropic Luciferian Order’s Liber Azerate predicts that “raging Chaos shall vanquish the useless cosmic gods, and the Ancient Ones shall tear the Universe into an empty void.”

First of all, that’s not a great plan. Second of all, it’s just not gonna happens, guys.

Even if you’re screwed up enough to find cosmic destruction appealing, the fact that it won’t happen makes it an inadequate basis for long-term planning, the same way the Tooth Fairy is never going to adjust for inflation and lave me a check big enough enough to pay off my credit card. Solid plan though it may seem at first blush.

Let’s resolve to make Satanism a religion of facing problems on their own real terms, rather than deferring to annihilation. Let the Misanthropic Luciferians and John Paul II’s of the world split that game plan down the middle. Or however many pieces they’d like for it to be in.