I ended the last part with these quotes from Karl Rahner and Luisa Picarretta:
Rahner:
There is an individual who discovers that he can forgive though he receives no reward for it, and silent forgiveness from the other side is taken as self-evident. There is one who tries to love God although no response of love seems to come from God’s silent incomprehensibility, although no wave of emotive wonder any longer supports him, although he can no longer confuse himself and his life-force with God, although he thinks he will die from such a love, because it seems like death and absolute denial, because with such a love one appears to call into the void and the completely unheard of, because this love seems like a ghastly leap into groundless space, because everything seems untenable and apparently meaningless. There is the person who does his duty where it can apparently only be done, with the terrible feeling that he is denying himself and doing something ludicrous for which no one will thank him. There is a person who is really good to another person from whom no echo of understanding and thankfulness is heard in return, whose goodness is not even repaid by the feeling of having been selfless, noble, and so on. There is one who is silent although he could defend himself, although he unjustly treated, who keeps silence without feeling that his silence is his sovereign unimpeachability. There is someone who obeys not because he must and would otherwise find it inconvenient to disobey, but purely on account of that mysterious, silent, and incomprehensible thing that we call God and the will of God. There is someone renounces something without thanks or recognition, and even without a feeling of inner satisfaction. There is a person who is absolutely lonely, who finds all the bright elements of life pale shadows, for whom all trustworthy handholds take him into the infinite distance, and who does not run away from this loneliness but treats it with ultimate hope. There is someone who discovers that his most acute concepts and most intellectually refined operations of the mind do not fit; that the unity of consciousness and that of which one is conscious in the destruction of all systems is now to found only in pain; that he cannot resolve the immeasurable multitude of questions, and yet cannot keep to the clearly known content of individual experience and to the sciences. There is one who suddenly notices how the tiny trickle of his life wanders through the wilderness of the banality of existence, apparently without aim and with the heartfelt fear of complete exhaustion. And yet he hopes, he knows not how, that this trickle will find the infinite expanse of the ocean, even though it may still be covered by the grey sands which seem to extend forever before him. There is God and his liberating grace. There we find what we Christians call the Spirit of God.
Luisa Picarretta:
When Pilate asked Me whether I was King, and I answered: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world, for if It were of this world, millions of legions of Angels would defend Me’. And Pilate, on seeing Me so poor, humiliated, despised, was surprised, and said with greater emphasis: ‘What? You are a King?’ And I, with firmness, answered him and all those who are in his position: ‘I am King, and I have come into the world to teach the truth. And the truth is that it is not positions, nor kingdoms, nor dignities, nor the right of command that make man reign, that ennoble him, that raise him above all. On the contrary, these things are slaveries, miseries, which make him serve vile passions and unjust men, making him also commit many unjust acts which disennoble him, cast him into mud, and draw the hatred of his subordinates upon him. So, riches are slaveries, positions are swords, by which many are killed or wounded. True reigning is virtue, to be stripped of everything, to sacrifice oneself for all, to submit oneself to all. This is true reigning, which binds all, and makes one loved by all. Therefore, my Kingdom will have no end, while yours is near to perishing.’ And, in my Will, I made these words reach the ear of all those who are in positions of authority, to let them know the great danger they are in, and to put on guard those who aspire to positions, to dignities, to command.”
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There is someone who obeys not because he must and would otherwise find it inconvenient to disobey, but purely on account of that mysterious, silent, and incomprehensible thing that we call God and the will of God.
What is the ultimate purpose of evil? What do demons and the most evil people want most for those to whom they do evil? They want their victims to obey power and not authority, for this is the definition of sin, and they want most of all for us to choose Hell over Heaven, preferably at every moment but especially at the moment of our death. What those vignettes articulated by Rahner display so beautifully and profoundly are examples of people choosing authority over power, the authority of what the existential moment in which they found themselves called for, of what the reality they were now experiencing dictated, of what God speaking to them right now in their unique and particular circumstances was asking from them. In every one of these examples, there was another choice available to them that would have brought them some increase in personal power or prestige, psychological well-being or emotional satisfaction, worldly stability or justice. Yet they did not choose it, and what they did choose brought them a decrease in these things without any apparent compensation. Why would they choose such a thing?
If I tried to answer by saying that they were aware of some other more obscure and spiritual good that they would obtain by renouncing the more worldly one, then these would no longer be examples of people choosing authority over power, just people choosing a less obviously worldly kind of power over authority. The true answer is that they chose authority over power because at this moment, God’s will, not their own, was what they wanted most. “Not my will by thine be done.” And why they or anyone chooses this is a mystery. What we do know is that unless we want this, unless we desire salvation over well-being and authority over power, we will not go to heaven after our death. In the choice they made at that moment, they defeated evil, and the demons and evil people who are now doing everything in their power to get us to choose hell can be defeated by no other way than for us to choose authority over power, salvation over well-being, God’s will over our own will at every moment of our lives, and especially at the moment of our death. Jesus tells Luisa:
True reigning is virtue, to be stripped of everything, to sacrifice oneself for all, to submit oneself to all. This is true reigning, which binds all, and makes
one loved by all.
If it weren’t for God having become a man and stripping Himself of everything, sacrificing Himself for all, and submitting Himself to all, we wouldn’t know the true nature of and difference between authority and power, salvation and well-being, Heaven and Hell, and if it weren’t for Him doing it on our behalf, we wouldn’t be able to choose the one and reject the other.
In the Warning, God will reveal to us all the times that we didn’t make the right choice, when we allowed evil to win and bring us closer to Hell. There will be no possibility of not seeing the truth about ourselves. He will just show it to us, and He will not threaten us with future punishments or attract us with future rewards. We will be in an analogous situation to the people described above right before they made their choices. We will be free to respond to what we see in the way we are always free to respond to each moment of our lives with a choice to obey authority or power. The difference is that at this moment, there will be no way of avoiding the truth that one has either chosen for authority or for power, and one will completely and clearly understand what this means. There have been dress rehearsals for the Warning, such as the plandemic.
Evil people inflicted fear on you in 2020 to get you to choose power over authority, to choose power as authority. They wanted you to reject truth as your authority. Normally, one chooses truth because it doesn’t cause much pain to do so, and the rewards are good ones. It’s not clear that one is choosing truth for its own sake, though, because of the power accompanying it, such as the power to preserve one’s life by accepting the natural truth of gravity, or the social power one achieves from obeying the moral truth that people generally like you when you are good to them, and they tend to be good to you back. You gave into this fear, and at some point, they lied to you about the masks and the lockdowns and the injection. In normal circumstances, you would have wondered if what was being told to you was the truth, since it was obvious that masks wouldn’t protect you that much, if at all, from a very small virus, and if they cared about your life and it were as deadly as they said, why would they want you to risk death by going outside wearing a flimsy piece of cloth and walking only one way in supermarkets? Then they wanted to force you to get an injection, but you kind of knew it wasn’t tested adequately. In any event, you knew it was wrong to believe things that very well could be untrue, and you would have asked questions to find out, but in this case, doing so meant a loss of power. You decided to choose to obey the authority of probable lies over justified truth because of the power it gave you, and thus you let evil get its way with you—and you took a step closer to Hell. But you were proud of your decision for Hell and you and your new friends bragged about it to each other and abused those who chose Heaven. And you told yourself that you were the ones who chose to love yourself and others and obey the truth and authority. No, you loved nothing and obeyed Satan.
If you haven’t repented of this, you’re not going to do well during the Warning. Why would you choose truth over lies when God shows it to you directly when you didn’t choose it when He showed it to you indirectly through your own power of reason and the advice and admonitions of others you knew were trustworthy? Why would you choose authority and salvation over power and well-being now if you didn’t then? It will be even harder for you now because you will get only pain from doing so and pleasure from rejecting it. This is your own doing. God will not coerce your decision, just as He didn’t then. And if you choose against Him now, you may never have a chance to choose for Him ever again.
God allows demons and evil people to coerce us with fear or pleasure so that He can see what we will choose when choosing Him means choosing against what will rid us of the fear and being us pleasure. This is what the plandemic was all about, and it looks like most Catholics chose against Him, including most of the bishops and priests as well as the occupier of the See of Rome. God also brings us into the dark night of the soul when He thinks we are ready, during which He Himself afflicts us, out of love, for the same purposes of spiritual trial. Whether evil does it, permitted by God out of love and justice, or He does it, God is now putting before us a choice between authority and power, salvation or well-being, love or self, His will or our own, and He is trying to get us to see that the stakes for our choice are either Heaven or Hell. Don’t wait until the Warning to make your choice. Repent, and choose God Alone—now.
We are certainly not trads, and I personally know very little about Rahner. I was considering sending your post to this priest. My reservation has to do with the meaning of the Warning, which I doubt he will know about or accept. But I thought it was worth noting that a priest I confronted about appropriate obedience is the one that I associate with Rahner. If you know Rahner perhaps you will have an inkling why. I don’t. Like I stated, we used to respect his viewpoint on things but it was his actions during the lockdown, not his affinity for Rahner, that makes us cautious now.
During the lockdown one priest that we had respected allowed a woman staff member to monitor the confession line to make sure people were masked and observing the six-foot spacing. If they did not obey there were told to leave, thus restricting the faithful’s access to the sacrament. When I wrote to him about the injustice he simply stated he was going to remain obedient to the bishop of our diocese, which was the greater good. This priest is a student of Rahner.