How did our country become so corrupt? Why doesn’t God intervene to punish the “great sinners” and deliver the few believers who remain faithful? What good can come from all the evil that continues to go unchecked?
We live with these questions every day as the wickedness of our world seems to increase exponentially. And never before have we witnessed such a sense of powerlessness to do anything about it.
It feels as if we are living the Psalms out loud, as if they were written exactly for our times.
Devastating as they are, we cannot pin all our suffering and problems on the great sinners of our time. We suffer from the sins of the whole nation. A nation whose people have forgotten God and replaced Him with a million gods – ranging from an idolized superstar to an idea, and from an idea to a set of amoral habits.
Like grains of dust, our sins – which we consider trifles – have piled high over the years from moral neglect. And now, like an avalanche, they collectively come crashing down on us.
We don’t have 10 minutes for God in prayer, but we give ourselves an extra 30 minutes to snuggle in bed or argue with our spouse or family members.
I could go to Mass or church, but then I’d miss the chance to meet a customer and wrap up a business deal.
What’s so bad about a little gossip? I really like that person at heart. It’s just some light humor to build my relationship with the boss. It’s a dog-eat-dog world any way.
What’s so bad about flirting with that woman or her flirting back? It adds a little zest to my humdrum day. We’ll go back to being just friends. We mustn’t be Puritans.
What does it matter if our marriage is nothing more than mutual consent to satisfy our material whims and sensual desires?
And children – they are inconvenient and expensive. Once born, there’s no need to go wearing ourselves out over them when we have baby sitters, nannies, school, TV and electronic games to take care of them.
These are so many little matters when compared to the really big sins we read about every day in our newspapers and see on TV.
That is how we think and talk.
Here’s what Jesus has to say through the writings of Catholic mystic Maria Valtorta:
“The great sinners exist because the mass is all more or less guilty of the same sins as they are.
“If the great had been faced with a healthy people in a moral, Christian sense – solidly obedient to the law of God and of human morality as well – they could not have arrived at their crimes. Their Satanism would have broken like a glass sword against a block of granite and been pulverized. And God would have blessed and protected you.
“But you have admired the major criminals, in whom you saw that perfection in crime that you could not reach, that perfection in amorality that you liked because it justified your own. You said, ‘If he, whom we admire, acts like this, I, too, can act this way.’ You said, ‘If God protects him, who is like this, He will also protect me, who am much less.’
“But I see and hear and note. And it is my sorrow not to be able to intervene, for when I intervene, you frustrate the intervention with your wickedness. You are so poisoned that you turn a good into an evil.
“You ask Me for a sign of power. But I cannot give this sign. Not because God has lost his capacity to act. Nothing is impossible for Me as God. But it is the hour of the power of Darkness. And men have spontaneously wanted it. The kingdom of Evil is already established. Anything I were to do would be rendered null by man’s will. Any Good would be destroyed by Evil.
“One sin rises upon another. And the tide of evil swells. And God cannot bend down where He sees a fondness for sin.
“I impotently witness all humanity’s race toward spiritual death. There is no gift, benefit, call or punishment by Me that will serve to arrest this spontaneous shipwreck in Satan of mankind, redeemed by Me. Like an enraged bull, humanity is demolishing everything: reason, morality and faith, and it is heading for a crash against what slays it. The profaning hand of man rises up for a new crime that does not deserve forgiveness. And the Father does not want to forgive. He lets you perish as you have wanted to.
“The only thing I can do – and do – is to hold back the wrath of my Father, who, weary for the crimes of a race for which my Blood has been shed to no avail, goes on wanting and wanting to apply Justice to you. And justice, since you are blameworthy, would mean tremendous punishments that my Mercy does not want to be added to those you cause yourselves on your own.
“I shall now speak to you as if you were all upright in heart – all of you, even those who are not upright. I want to invite you once more.
“My people, come to the Lord. I, the Lord, will not reject the people that comes to Me, and, if it remains close to Me, I shall provide for it ‘until justice becomes judgment – that is, until time comes to an end and eternity begins.’ I shall open my arms to shield those who believe in Me and invoke Me with a contrite heart trusting in my mercy, and ‘I shall defend them from those hunting down the just and condemning innocent blood.’ There are few of this kind on earth, but for the sake of those few I shall still grant grace.
“But – and it is your God who is imploring you – come back to Me. Please come back to Me. Free yourselves individually from your sins of lack of faith, moral disobedience and sevenfold vice, and I shall then free the collectivity from its scourges.”1
1 (Maria Valtorta, The Notebooks 1944, Volume 2; used by permission of the publisher Centro Editoriale Valtortiano srl, Viale Piscicelli 89-91, 03036 Isola del Liri FR, Italy)