A glimpse at the Church in Cleansing Fire

The accelerating rate of change in our world is obvious and dramatic. The old world order is rapidly dissolving and our economic systems, our religious systems, our cultural systems and our governmental systems are evolving – or devolving –on a daily basis before our disbelieving eyes. Everyone agrees that we are globally on the threshold of an entirely different way of living. Some people look, with hopeful optimism, to what will come next. Other people are horrified with what they believe they can see coming towards us on the red dawn of a frightening new day. Societal evolution, and its preferred intellectual methodology, applied and known in theology as “Modernism”, is now a fact of everyday life.

In the study of Catholic theology today, the question is not “has this Modernism taken over the Catholic Church?” There is no doubt that such a take-over was accomplished long before His Holiness Pope Paul VI officially ended the administration of the “Oath Against Modernism” back in 1967, shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council. No one will disagree with that conclusion when they compare the Catholic Church of Pope Saint Pius X in 1908 with the “Catholic” Church of Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. The question today is, simply, this: “Is Modernism, which has now reformed Our Catholic Church and forced so many changes in how we pray and what we believe, really as harmful as Pope Saint Pius X said it was.” In other words, is the Modernism embraced by so many Vatican officials since the Council, best seen in the post-Conciliar discouragement of conversions from other religions to the Catholic faith, really the “synthesis of all heresies”? Will that philosophy, “lead not just to the end of the Catholic religion, but to the end of all religion on earth”, as Pope Saint Pius X warned it would?

In my historical novel Cleansing Fire – Welcome to the New Springtime, I have tried to answer these questions in this way: Yes. Modernism is indeed the “Synthesis of all heresies”. But no – it will not ultimately lead to the end of all religion on earth because Almighty God will halt its advance before it gives the fallen angels their complete victory over the Church. That is, before Modernism brings the end of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, this book leaves no doubt that Modernism will be eradicated, and the world will be cleansed through the arrival of God’s long-prophesied “fire from Heaven”. The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against the Church and, in the end, the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin will triumph though this “Cleansing Fire”.

Cleansing Fire is a genre-shifting book which alternates between chapters of factual essays on the history and declining condition of the Catholic Church and chapters of historical fiction or “faction” where actual events and historical persons are presented in historically possible, but fictional, settings and dialogue. The book also contains a third kind of chapter – these are chapters of complete fiction involving, for the most part, imagined persons and significant events which did not happen – but could have – and perhaps, still will. It is in these “truly fictional” chapters that possible future events and creative solutions to very real, current problems of the Church are suggested and explored.

There are, in total, 48 of these either “factual”, “historical fiction” or “truly fictional” kinds of chapters in this book. Two of these chapters have been faithfully reprinted with my permission by well-known columnist Matt C. Abbott in his column found on the web site Renew America (renewamerica.com) on August 7, 2009 and September 1, 2009. All of the book’s chapters are arranged in a way that challenges the reader to regularly shift gears as they time travel – chapter by chapter – across some very rugged cultural and theological terrain. There are years identified at the beginning of most chapters so as to help the reader note their temporal progress through history.

In the “historical fiction” chapters there are peaks and valleys the reader will explore in this journey. The peaks in the pages are represented by the sunlit slopes where Traditional Catholicism still exists, though partially concealed behind the clouds of Satan’s smoke, fanned up by the Modernists from the dark valleys. Although the Saints are harder to spot today climbing the high trails, they still do exist, if in obscurity, in the real world. They are, however, much easier to find in the pages of this book. In their backpacks are the reprints or originals of the old, holy (pre-conciliar) books still in circulation in those blessed plateaus of prayer where the Latin Mass still lives amidst the isolated, but growing families. These historical chapters introduce the readers to these heroes of the high ground and their secure settlements with the closer view of Heaven. The reader will also be introduced to the enemies from below who live in darkness, curse the light, and those who dwell in it.

The “truly fictional” chapters, found primarily toward the end of the book, are not completely devoid of factual foundations. The mostly fictional characters there stand upon truth taken from all that has been presented before. But those chapters also dare to extrapolate into the heights of what grace can do for the individual, the Church and the world. Although these chapters may well reflect the author’s heartfelt expressions of his prayer life and wishful thinking, still they do not foreclose the possibility that those events might still happen – or are even happening now – if it is God’s will.

Much of the power of the “historical fiction”, and the “truly fictional” chapters found later in the book, is derived from the “factual” chapters that precede them. The facts surrounding the paramount issue of the book – specifically, the Modernist take-over of the Catholic Church – are far too compelling to be relegated to mere innuendo, or as some dramatic backdrop scenery behind the book’s players and events. The pre-conciliar popes were right to warn us that this Modernism will inevitably lead to the end of all religion. That is why we have been watching dogma appear to change and, consequently, faith in a familiar body of beliefs decay and dissolve around us since the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The decline perpetrated by the Modernists has reached the point of no return without Divine intervention. God must show the pendulum of Catholic devotion where to swing now.

All of the undeniable statistics, the encyclicals and the headlines noted or quoted in the book, which predict and document the decline of the Catholic Church at the hands of the Modernists, often force the fiction in some chapters to the margins. That is intentional. For the reader expecting Cleansing Fire to be a typical novel with one imaginative story-book chapter flowing into another, this may seem a little jarring as factual essays momentarily “stop the story”. The real intent, however, is not to break up the flow for the reader, but rather to add more intensity to the historical fiction by regularly supercharging these fictional chapters with the voltage of actual, verifiable historical events flowing from the factual ones.

I hope that the insights presented in the factual chapters, which speak for themselves, will lead the reader to greater conclusions about the Catholic religion than this author could ever hope to reach by ordinary creative writing and simple story telling. Perhaps, as I have presented in this book the teachings of great saints of the Church, the reader will reflect upon their wisdom and observe, as did Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange on reading, as a youth, another book:

“I glimpsed how the doctrine of the Catholic Church is the absolute Truth about God, about His inner life, and about man, his origins and his supernatural destiny. As if in an instant of time, I saw how this doctrine is not simply ‘the best we can put forward based on our present Knowledge’, but the absolute truth which shall not pass away…”

Peter B. Kelly is a practicing attorney and the author of Cleansing Fire.