By Judie Brown
The word “pit” in the title refers to the specific pit commonly known as hell—a place of excruciating, never-ending suffering for the souls of those who have rejected God. As Monsignor Charles Pope writes,
The souls in hell may have refused to empty their arms to receive His embrace, but God has not withdrawn His love for them. He permits those who have rejected Him to live apart from him. God honors their freedom to say no, even respecting it when it becomes permanent, as it has for fallen angels and the souls in hell.
Such teaching begs a question about people like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), a self-described Catholic who recently stated that, in her opinion, “Trump” is a bad word, similar to a swear word. As she explained, “I’m afraid, you know, when I grew up Catholic, as I am now, if you said a bad word, you could burn in hell if you didn’t have a chance to confess. So I don’t want to take any chances.” Later in the interview, having said his name, she commented, “I hope I don’t burn in hell.”
Clearly Pelosi has a strange idea regarding what is and is not offensive to God. But then again, this is not surprising, as the woman has advocated for killing preborn babies for years.
Of course, Pelosi is not alone in her advocacy of horrific actions. We see this advocacy in hospitals and even within families.
A recent headline explained: “‘Horrifying’ Mistake to Take Organs from a Living Person Was Averted, Witnesses Say.” Apparently transplant doctors noticed that a scheduled organ donor was still alive and immediately stopped their harvesting preparations. Worse still is the fact that this is not a one-off situation. Lung transplant algorithms have frequently “harmed sick and dying patients.” While the formula was supposed to lead to a fairer distribution of healthy lungs to those with problematic ones, the problem is that in the real world, blood types need to be matched and other metrics need to be addressed. In other words, human beings do not neatly fit into mathematical formulas.
And there is the growing challenge confronted in the pronoun wars. The writer of a recent article asks a valid question: “Is it just for officials to compel people of faith to ignore their constitutionally protected beliefs in obligating them to use students’ preferred pronouns?”
Could it be that after 2,000 years of precedent simple words like him and her have only now become insufficient to differentiate between men and women?
Of course this is madness, but we live in a time of gender confusion, obfuscation, and distortion. As journalist Helen Joyce recently pointed out:
Something you may not have thought of is that there are a lot of people who can’t move on from this. And that’s the people who have transitioned their own children. So those people are going to be like the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn’t know the war was over. They’ve got to fight forever. This is another reason why this is the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we’ll ever have experienced.
The victims of this social pollution are, as usual, children, and yet thinking adults appear at times to be unable to muster the courage to defend innocence, not to mention honesty. All one needs to do is ask, When did God create a third gender?
And yet at the deepest level of the pit are those who feel that conducting a survey to determine how many Catholics actually believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist is a valid query.
One recent report stated, “‘There is a strong perception that Church leaders, including bishops and the pope, are inconsistent and weak in upholding Canon 915,’ which requires Holy Communion to be denied to manifest grave sinners, according to a presentation by Public Opinion Strategies.”
Does anybody in their right mind actually believe that a survey will resolve the question of why Catholic people in general do not understand and fully embrace the real presence? It seems to me that any faithful Catholic with eyes to see recognizes the awful truth, which is that Catholics who deny Christ’s presence as real are people who have abandoned Christ, not to mention their alleged faith.
We pray to God for the misguided souls who perpetuate the diabolical lies, and we pray for the souls of those affected by them. We know and believe that our just and merciful Father sees the pit, knows its liars, and awaits the return of the prodigals to His loving grace.