Abomination of desolation
“Therefore when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand)”.
An explanation: in my work I use the term “vector of abandonment”. This vector is the opposite of a vector of attachment and love. Those vectors are present in all human actions: vectors of love are holding the creation together; vectors of abandonment are destroying it. Jesus Christ is the ultimate vector of love, Love itself.
A kind of a sign
Yesterday I had a strange experience in the tiny Roman Catholic chapel after Mass. I have had murky thoughts about “abomination of desolation” after ‘Fiducia Supplicans’, a declaration that allows blessing of homosexual couples, came up.[1] In my mind I “saw” a homosexual couple standing there in the church (their silhouettes against its interior with Jesus Christ, His Mother, St Joseph and saints and angels depicted on stained glass windows) being blessed by a priest – and that sight was absolutely mad. I asked Our Lord for a sign re: “abomination of desolation” because I did not want to be presumptuous and take my thoughts for His. I was praying after Mass when suddenly something that I have never witnessed before happened: a five-year old child of some “traditional Catholics” rode into the church… on his bicycle! He rode straight to the sanctuary and, as if it was not enough, picked up his bicycle, put it into the sanctuary and began riding there. His mother came after him but not quick enough to prevent his entrance into the sanctuary. She called him yet he did not care – he was riding there behind the altar with a defiant smile so she had to pull him out of there. I did not really see her removing him, to me the event i.e. what I saw clearly was a strange ride into the Church and then – around the altar.
Looking back, I think it was a kind of a sign – not that a child himself was “an abomination” of course – but that his actions could be done only in a non-sanctuary and non-church. Indeed, if he just ran (not cycled) in for the purpose of looking at something (as children do sometimes, crawling into the sanctuary) it would be entirely different and quite normal. No, he was riding as if it was not a church at all.
Today, when I went to Mass again, the feeling was heavy and clear. I felt a presence of something dark in the corner of the sanctuary or in the Church as such. It was that “abomination of desolation” in question. I again “saw” in my mind a blessing of homosexual couple before the altar. Today’s Gospels reading contained the words of Christ “whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother”. I felt as if something hit me hard. “The will of My Father!” Suddenly I felt that the most recent action of the Roman Catholic Church, the document that allows (read “obligates”) blessing of homosexual couples, being a violation of God’s will as it is expressed in the divine revelation nullifies all that is happening in the church. I had a somewhat similar feeling after the extent of “historical” child sexual abuse in the local diocese was uncovered by the Royal Commission and, most pivotal, met with the dead silence of the congregation – but not nearly as strong. One realization was identical though: I felt that it was precisely carrying on Mass as before, by a priest and by parishioners – before the scandal of child sexual abuse and before the scandal of ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ – i.e. pretending that all is OK, with no word about what was happening – that silence was emptying the Mass, making it unreal in some sense. I felt nausea and wondered if the Eucharist was the true Body and Blood of Christ now. It became clear to me that only an open rejection, by the local church, of the heresy of ‘Fiducia Supplicans’, could put my mind at rest regarding the reality of the Body and Blood – not as a doctrine but in each church silent about ‘Fiducia Supplicans’.
Holy splitting
At last, I seem to have understood what “abomination of desolation” is, in the temples of the Holy Spirit. Abomination of desolation cannot be achieved via a clear and straightforward rejection of the will of God = His design as it is expressed in His words and then doing what one wants. Abomination of desolation is reading those words aloud in the Church, kissing the Word, the Bible which contains them, preaching them, partaking the Word, Christ in the Eucharist and then doing what one wants, in an oblique, deceitful, lying way in the same Church – like abusing the children or blessing homosexual couples. It is + and – which make 0, nothing, desolation in a temple of the Holy Spirit[2] and the whole Church.
It happened before. We receive Holy Communion and then we received an abortion-tainted vaccine[3] and then we preached against abortion and the usage of the human fetal cells calling it “evil” and “a despicable violation of a dignity of helpless human beings” and then again received the vaccine created with the usage of the cells of those very human beings and then shed tears over “the Holy Innocents”[4] and so it goes, endlessly. We do not repent because if we repented it would be a recognition of the sin of benefiting from the murder of “a helpless human being” and if we recognized the sin, it would be much more difficult to receive a sinful vaccine and even more so – to preach against abortions because if we eagerly partake the fruit of abortions how can we preach against them? And this is exactly what the Roman Catholic Church has done, and not just the Roman Catholic Church but the Eastern Orthodox Church and other Churches as well during COVID-19, with some sporadic dissention in places.
Likewise, if we recognize the biological abnormality (according to the natural law) and sinfulness (according to the Scriptures) of the homosexual intimate relationship – as it has been the teaching of the Church and of the Old Israel even before the creation of the New Israel – we can either name a sin aloud and then bless homosexuals so the blessing would aid them in repentance and in a battle with their sin. Or we can reconsider the teaching of the Church, find it to be mistaken, say it aloud and then bless homosexual relationships as being good in the eyes of God. As long as the Church accepts and teaches that homosexual sex is sinful, it cannot bless a homosexual couple. Likewise, the Church cannot teach that a marriage is only for a man and a woman and bless homosexual couples at the same time because those two actions are mutually exclusive, just as preaching against abortions and against the usage of the human fetal cells excludes “blessing” the abortion-tainted vaccine.
I am not going to address here the most common argument of the proponents of the blessings of homosexual couples in the Roman Catholic Church who manage to split their conscience to the point of truly believing that blessing a couple does not mean an approval of the very actions which make them a couple because “we are blessing them as persons”. It has been addressed already, by the fact that the Church has been imparting blessings on the all kinds of persons (including homosexual) for all its history hence there was no need of a document that states so – unless one had in a mind something else than blessing a person, in this case the blessing of a couple as a couple. “No, they are blessed as persons”. Here we go again.
Apart from a common sense of a non-split conscience there are many other good arguments against ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ and those interested can easily find them online. The purpose of this paper is to provide a different kind of argument against this document.
A swap
Just like a couple of years ago when Pope Francis “blessed” the vaccines that have their origins in the murder of human beings and proclaimed that if we love our neighbour we must partake them – otherwise we are selfish sinners, now the same Pope Francis orders his priests to conduct blessing of homosexual couples – otherwise they are sinners against the unity of the Church, he said.
It is clear that in both cases Pope Francis accomplishes a transfer, taking a sin from where it belongs and sticking it to what in fact is a righteous action – at least according to the Church’s teaching. It is righteous to reject a morally compromised vaccine[5]; vaccination has nothing to do with “love for a neighbour” because via being vaccinated one protects himself only and also because, as it was reluctantly admitted, a vaccinated person is not less contagious than one who is unvaccinated[6] - hence the Pope’s “new commandment” was based on deception and lies.
Likewise, it is not those people who reject blessing of homosexual couples as contrary to the Church teaching who are sinning against the unity of the Church, but those who introduce, contrary to Church teaching, the blessing of homosexual couples who are sinning against the unity of the Church, causing divisions and confusion. No heretical ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ – no division and confusion, no “you are guilty against unity because you reject the heretical ‘Fiducia Supplicans’ – this is a lie. Noteworthy, this lie is a good example of the typical “logic” of a narcissist who operates on the level of habitual transference, of his own sin, to the one who rejects it and is thus pictured as intrinsically bad: “Your proposition is sinful” – “No, you are sinful because you call my proposition sinful!”, and so on.
It cannot be underscored enough that Pope Francis could not proclaim partaking a morally compromised vaccine to be obligatory for Christians (and those who care about “the good of others in general) unless he swept a sin (or “abomination”) attached to the idea of partaking of the fruits the abortion of a human foetus under the carpet so to speak. Likewise, he would not be able to order blessing of homosexual couples without “putting aside” the word “sin” re: homosexual relationships. Calling it “a sin” (or “abomination” as the Scriptures call it) in accordance with the Church’s teaching would mean that a blessing of a homosexual couple is not possible – unlike a blessing of a homosexual person, an individual as it was said above. In the case with an abortion-tainted vaccine, calling it what it is i.e. “sinful, morally compromised, diabolical, a sign of human depravity” would mean that it could not be possible to impose it on believers.
Unwanted, used
Apart from easily recognizable similarities like avoiding the word “sin”, brushing aside the teaching of the Church while trumpeting it during homilies, an enduring motto “for the good of others” that long ago swapped “for the godly good = for God, the ultimate Good” and so on there is another common feature or better to say a vector which binds the two phenomena together, making them consecutive stops on the way towards something that has not been uncovered yet. It is a vector of compromising or cancelling the personhood, of born and unborn human beings, for the good of others.
The essay ‘Communion of abandonment’ written in 2021 considered the dilemma presented by an abortion-tainted vaccine through the lens of the personhood, of an aborted human foetus being progressively reduced to the abbreviation HEK293 (“human embryonic kidney”). I argued there that, contrary to the Roman Catholic theory of a remote cooperation with the evil[7], that each step of utilization of the body of a human being represents a further and more decisive step in the process of dehumanization/depersonalization – of her and also of those who do these things with her body/partake of the result, however “remotely” they participate in the process. It is the vector of an abandonment of a human being that erases her personhood and also a self-abandonment/self-erasing, of those who participate in it.
Very briefly: a mother aborts her child, a person, hence the foetus is a human being and a person in the moment of an abortion and immediately after. Her body is the body of a human being, of a person – to verify this thesis one needs only to look at the depiction of a human foetus 3-4 months old, the approximate age at abortion of the person ‘HEK293’. From the moment when her body is stuck in a fridge “for further use” it begins losing its human dignity/personhood. Some scientist decides to extract some organs from that “waste” and to experiment with it. One day he or someone else achieves a breakthrough, the cells of the organ begin reproducing endlessly and are thus called “immortalized”. Eventually those “immortal cells” named “HEK293” find their way to the market to be sold and used for further experiments and production of various goods “for the good of others” including vaccines, cosmetics and the design of flavoring substances. Each step degrades and atomizes the murdered human person until she is practically non-existent. Each step thus has an underlying vector of an abandonment, of her and also of the notion of who a human being is.
This vector of the abandonment and erasing of another human being is tending towards hell (ultimate abandonment) and is shared by each participant. To partake a vaccine that has its origin in the murder and utilization of a human being, a child, without even the slightest discomfort and remorse means to make both the victim and oneself non-human. When it is done in the world it is just sick – sick enough for some non-Christians to refuse to do it. When it is done in the Christian Church, with the head of that Church pushing it upon the faithful calling it “a sin” the refuse to partake of the fruit of this sin – means not only him making benefiting from a murder morally uncomplicated and even righteous, he also implicitly sanctifies and blesses the murder of that child and its usage in an act of “blessing” the vaccine – and that is an abomination of desolation or at least a vector towards it.
The above argument rests on the notion of the personhood of human beings since their conception; that they are made in the image of God and are thus sacred. This is why an abortion and benefiting from it is always evil, no matter why it is done. Many non-Christians do not ascribe to this teaching of the Christian Church yet they do not fail to see the personhood of people in a somewhat reminiscent situation, the destruction of human beings in Nazi concentration camps – and not just destruction but utilization of what can be used in their bodies like their skin for bags or lampshades or their hair for mattresses. Many perceive that while the destruction of a human being is evil, to treat his body as a commodity is somehow even more evil, something unspeakably diabolical. I presume the instinctive grasp of an inborn human dignity in the other is the key.
Let us now move from the children who were deliberately not born to those who will be deliberately born – and see the same vector of depersonalization and abandonment latently present in a quite new concept, of “a homosexual family”.
Wanted, used
Homosexual couples now have a possibility of having “their own” children – not conceived in a normal way but “created” specifically for them.[8] A lesbian couple obtains someone’s sperm, injects it into one of them, gets pregnant and produces a child who from the moment of his/her conception is deprived of his/her natural (i.e. granted by the biology of the species) right to have a father – a right which comes naturally in a case with a heterosexual couple or not even a right but “a part of a package” of being conceived in an age-old normal way. No matter what the qualities of the father are, whether he left or even died before a child’s birth – a child born from a heterosexual relationship has at least a sense of belonging to the biological normality of his species i.e. the fact that he was a natural result of the sexual intercourse of his parents, father and mother, man and woman who had a relationship with each other. A child can easily identify himself and his own history with the history of humanity and its primary archetypes.
A “created” child does not have that normality which humankind has always taken for granted. An “artificially created” child will not have his father to fulfill a crucial role in a child’s development; to aid a necessary emotional separation a child from a mother, weaning them from an infantile narcissism. Or to teach what amounts to being a man, via their relationship. For a child there will be no daily intimate observations of his father’s and mother’s relationship, of how two spouses, man and woman, communicate and relate and so on. The notion of fatherhood will also not be known to that child practically, at least in a way it is known to a child of heterosexual parents. In a word, what happens naturally in the life of a child of heterosexual parents = the desired norm, which is seen as a tragedy if disrupted by some sad circumstance, is abandoned = erased via his manner of birth in the “homosexual family”.
The vector of abandonment (of an anti-attachment) is even more evident in the situation with two homosexual men who, to obtain “their own” child, go for the option of surrogacy. Their sperm is injected into some woman, a child is born and then the bond that is the closest and most important of all bonds, between a mother and a child, is severed and a child loses his mother = three crucial years of an emotional symbiosis with her and of unconditional love which no man can give just like no woman can later serve to emotionally individuate a child from his mother. Naturally, the losses caused by the denial of a child’s developmental need of a father outlined above are equally applicable to a case of a denial of a child’s corresponding need of a mother.
Symbolically, a child is being taken away from his father or his mother by two women or two men who need that child to satisfy their need to have a “natural family”. The basic rights, the needs, of a child, to have a father and a mother, man and woman, two sexes, two sets of psyches interacting and stimulating his own psyche in different unique ways is discarded, sacrificed, abandoned for the needs of two adults – without consideration for the child’s basic developmental needs. It is legitimate to say that the disregard of a child’s needs amounts to the denial of his/her personhood. A thought comes to a mind, of how does this differ from the Australian case of the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children; and how the former can be accepted by so many of those who rightfully condemn the latter?
Apparently, it is easy to overlook the needs of children if one identifies oneself with some ideology or with couples in question. “They are committed to each other, why can’t they have their own children” or “they are a family” or even “they have a right to have their own children”.[9] I hope those arguments may look different now, after considering the notion of a child who somehow has to be conceived artificially for the sake of others, not to have a father or a mother but two fathers or two mothers for the sake of the psychological needs or personal desires of those others, his naturally ingrained bond with his true father or true mother severed or cancelled for the sake of those others, his personal development as a boy or a girl compromised for the sake of those others etc., so that those who “got” him from a real father or a real mother could feel good and “love” him. No loving parent (homosexual or heterosexual) would deliberately put his child though the tragic abnormality described above unless there is something in that parent’s psyche that makes it impossible for them to see that tragic abnormality.[10]
I am quite convinced that homosexuality and blessing of homosexual couples must be examined against the natural outcome of a marriage, children. There is no problem with blessing a homosexual person and there is a huge problem (of impossibility) with blessing a homosexual couple. Why is it so? – Because a homosexual couple, even if they do not intend to “create” children, have this option now, latent within their “family”, just like any heterosexual couple have it, no matter what their fertility. Hence, when the Church blesses them, it inevitably blesses that latent possibility.
From here it follows that the Church now blesses the process of children being “artificially created” to satisfy the needs of their homosexual “parents” and all that entails. That is, the Church now blesses the practice of taking children away from their true fathers and mothers. That their normal personal development is being compromised is also being blessed by the Church – all that while teaching about a family that can be only a union of a man and a woman and about the indispensability of such a family for properly bringing up children, including their spiritual development, with the Holy Family given as an example. Surrogacy, while being specifically condemned by the Pope recently, is also now being blessed in the blessing of homosexual couples, so as the IVF, prohibited in other cases. The Church now blesses a cancellation of the natural rights given to children (and their biological parents) by God or of the normality as such based upon the evolution of humankind, the primal rights and normality given to any member of our species, to be conceived by their parents, to be borne by their parents, to be attached to them or, if some tragedy happens, to be attached to a father’s or mother’s figure – all this while preaching the theology of the natural family as a symbol of the love of God for humanity, the dignity and rights of human beings made in the image of God (including children) and so on.
Hence, the Church now blesses the violation of the personhood of children and this is why blessing of homosexual couples has the same vector as that of blessing an abortion-tainted vaccine. The vector of abandonment and lies – abandonment and lies that are intrinsic to “a new creation”, a creation of a vaccine out of a child or the creation of a child himself. In the first case the personhood of children is denied = they are abandoned via utilizing their bodies for the good of others and via “erasing” them, in the second – via utilizing their whole beings for the good (the will) of others and then that abandonment is enhanced via the blessing of the homosexual couple and not just enhanced – it is being pushed, so to speak, into the throats of the faithful who still can sense that something is wrong with that.
Well faithful, here it is, that wrong is not just what you think it is, not just because it is a contradiction of a condemnation of homosexuality in the Scriptures, not just because homosexuality messes up the creation making “a wrong sign”, not the sign of Adam and Eve but of Adam and Adam or Eve and Eve instead, contrary to “male and female He created them” and then put them together for procreation condemning Sodom and Gomorra. No, this is not the “abomination of desolation” yet. The true abomination is sacrificing children to feed the perverse artificial world which the Church is how trying to bless with all its might. And “abomination of desolation” is to pretend that it does not.
23 January 2024
----------------------------
[1] While ‘FS’ speaks also about blessings of other couples in “irregular situations” like divorced and remarried, only homosexual couples are the subject of this paper, why will become clear by the end of it. Of note, those who are concerned also tend to focus exclusively on homosexual couples – perhaps because of an intuition that the blessing of heterosexual “irregular” couples has practically no consequences compare to the blessing of homosexual couples. Also, divorced and remarried couples have been blessed for as long as the practice of annulment of a marriage has existed, in the Roman Catholic Church or an ecclesiastical divorce, in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
[2] “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own” (Cor 6:19)
[3] That is, a vaccine which utilized the cells of an aborted human embryo/foetus, whether in their development, manufacture, or testing.
[4] The feast in commemoration of the babies killed by the order of Herod.
[5] Especially in view that there were also ethical i.e. not abortion-tainted COVID-19 vaccines as well but the Pope unambiguously prohibited the faithful to demand the access to them or even to demand the least unethical vaccine, see ‘Communion of abandonment’ for the detailed argument.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Which maintains, very roughly speaking, that the further from an initial sinful action – the less sin of those who benefit from it. While it is true in many cases, a sin of a violation of personhood being repeated creates the opposite vector, of a growing depravity of humanity, of the abandonment a human person “for the good of others”.
[8] Those who adopt the abandoned are not a subject of this discourse; they do not act along the vector of abandonment.
[9] I suspect than an argument about the right of a homosexual couple to have own children may appear convincing only in the case of a swap or overlap of that couple, in one’s a mind, with an archetypical couple, male and female, because the “right” of a heterosexual couple to have children does not come from outside, from some governing body, but is engrained in their bodies in the form of different but matching sets of genitals to be joined in sexual intercourse. A couple can claim “a right” to have children only if that right already belongs to them, by being male and female – and in fact it is not even a right but a natural outcome of our shared evolution, the union of the opposite sexes reproducing according to our species. No matter how hard a homosexual couple may try to exercise that right by their own will, man with man or woman with woman, trying to conceive through sexual intercourse – nothing will happen, no conception will be achieved because biology, sadly, did not give them such an option hence no intrinsic “right”.
[10] Some research in the area of homosexuality indicates a correlation between so-called “emotionally absent father” in the life of a female child and her tendency to engage in lesbian relationships, thus symbolically erasing the notion of a man altogether. For such a woman, denying to her child a father would be a repetition of her own childhood experience. There are also other unfortunate circumstances frequently observed in the families of origin of people with a same sex attraction, like a narcissistic abuse or emotional incest. Whatever it is, the blindness to the normal needs of a child by such couples points to some “blind spot” in the psyche or a form of narcissism.