Pride Month, Leftism, and ‘The Ape of the Church’

It is once again “Pride Month,” that special season set aside by leftists to worship sexual sin, degeneracy, debauchery, and depravity. “Pride Month” is, in many ways, the leftist’s holy season, the leftist’s diabolical inversion of such truly holy seasons as Advent and Lent in the Catholic calendar. As both Advent and Lent are a time of self-denial and self-mastery, of hopeful anticipation, of spiritual preparation for the birth and resurrection of God-made-man, “Pride Month” is an inversion of it: a time of self-indulgence and celebration of enslaving sin, of boastful “fulfillment,” of carnally declaring that man is his own god.

This assertion is not mere hyperbole. Leftism is indeed a religion, and the trappings which denote it as such have been foreseen in the past, particularly in the past hundred years or so. The Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen warned in 1947 that Satan will establish here on earth a sort of anti-Church, “which will be the ape of the Church because he, the devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ.” (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Bishop Robert Barron Praises Atheist Bill Maher. Why?)

In 1907, the English author and priest Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson proffered a similar prophesy in his novel Lord of the World. In that dystopia, the world has been largely rid of all notion of religion, with the ruling classes of the West adopting both atheistic communism and Freemasonry. There are, of course, ceremonies, speeches, parades, and the like, but not formal worship. But the arrival of the Antichrist ushers in a new era: apostate priests are hired to devise a new liturgical worship, the worship of man as god.

Sheen also spoke of the Antichrist as developing a new sort of religion, disguised under the principles of humanitarianism:

He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live … he will explain guilt away psychologically as inhibited eroticism, make men shrink in shame if their fellowmen say they are not broadminded and liberal; he will be so broadminded as to identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong, truth and error; he will spread the lie that men will never be better until they make society better … he will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is “vital,” he will increase love for love and decrease love for persons; he will invoke religion to destroy religion; he will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived; his mission he will say will be to liberate men from the servitudes of superstition and Fascism, which he will never define. But in the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; he will not believe in God.

Such a characterization surely calls to mind the leftist cult vying today for dominance over the Western world. Those whose principles are diametrically opposed to the morality preached by Christianity for 2,000 years insist that they are devout lovers of God, that their perverted policies are in service of His Kingdom. (Joe Biden, for instance, never misses an opportunity to brand himself a “devout Catholic,” despite his decidedly anti-Catholic positions on nearly everything.) “Tolerance” has, indeed, become the leftists’ “sanctified” name for indifference to right and wrong, truth and error. “Pride Month” itself evinces this: an unnatural vice is lauded as a valid expression of love, even though it destroys both body and soul; the surgical mutilation of children’s healthy genitals is hailed as “lifesaving,” while efforts to protect children from such irreversible horrors are derided as bigoted.

In fact, leftism has instituted its own set of unholy sacraments. The brilliant Dr. Peter Kreeft wrote, “Abortion is the Antichrist’s demonic parody of the eucharist. That’s why it uses the same holy words, ‘This is my body,’ with the blasphemous opposite meaning.” Every religion requires sacrifice: in the Catholic faith, the Eucharist is Christ’s own sacrifice on the cross — in leftism, the unborn innocents are slaughtered on the altar of antichrist. Transgenderism becomes a sort of leftist baptism, necessitating being born again and taking on a new name. And homosexuality becomes the leftist caricature of holy matrimony. Marriage is centered on the family, on self-giving love mirroring the love of God Himself and resulting in new life; homosexual acts are incapable of producing a family, and center instead on self-gratifying appetite, consuming the other to satisfy oneself.

“Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world. The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on,” Sheen declared of the religion of Hell-on-Earth. “From now on, the struggle will be … for the souls of men.” (READ MORE: The Holy Eucharist and the Hint of an Explanation)

As moral degeneracy and cultural decadence become more and more common, more and more pronounced, it is time to look from these earthly cities to Heaven, the City of God. If we model ourselves after the denizens of Heaven, then not only may we hope one day to reside there for eternity, to join the ranks of those we emulate here on earth, but we may also find our own earthly cities transformed, perhaps mirroring a little better, a little more closely, the City of God.