If an infant boy or girl is Baptized in the Catholic Church and is then raised in a Catholic Mafia family and culture which glorifies Mafia murder, oppression and theft with stories, folklore and values that are embedded in the brain of every Mafia family child, there is a significant probability that he or she is going to turn out to be a “good” Mafioso rather than a good follower of Jesus. He or she will become the enfleshment of the Mafia spirit, the embodiment of Mafia values. He or she will become a story, a piece of Mafia folklore, a model for children born into Mafia families for generations to come.
As if it is their second nature, children so raised will think, say and do, that is imitate, what their Mafioso ancestors have always thought, said and done, with certain adjustments depending whether one is in Sicily or New York. For example, Joe “the Animal” Barboza, a Boston Mafia enforcer, a monster renowned for putting an enemy’s hands in a fish tank full of piranha as a punishment for him and as a warning to others, is still the stuff of legend and humorous stories at Mafia gatherings, fifty years after he was murdered.
My point is that if the family, the culture, the society and the religion of a group uniformly nurture children year in and year out, decade in and decade out, century in and century out in stories, fiction and nonfiction, of the glories, and even sanctity, of this group’s long and continuous millennia of past homicidal violence, enmities and deceptions, it will by necessity spawn in generation after generation a large percentage of Joe Barbozas, people trapped in the spirit of or in the mental disorders of Joe Barboza.
The Father of all, God who is love (agape), loves the human being Joseph Barboza, whom in His love He drew out of nothingness. The Father will continue to love him for all eternity. To the Father he is not a monster. He is a beloved son. But, the Father does not love and never loved the wicked spirit, mind-style, behavioral style, value system that were placed in him by the wicked choices of people in his particular generational line to which he was subjected and the nurturing that preceded him and into which he was born.
Everyone lives under the gravity of the wickedness hidden in his or her own genealogical history, as well as, in the atmosphere of wickedness lurking in his or her normal cultural structures,e.g. state, chuch, school, media, family, language patterns, etc.; wickness is intractable and relentless. There is no conquering of it by reason alone. Since reason is insufficient to get beyond wickedness rooted as deep as the individual’s DNA and as universal as consciousness itself, reason dictates to search for revelation that will liberate.
Reason also informs all human beings that when a person goes looking for revelation, which will free themselves and all humanity from the perpetual wickedness so universally pervasive that daily it turns life on earth into a furnace of untold agonies, one wants to find the truth and only the truth. Whether one’s abode is a cardboard shelter in a dump in Manila or an imperial suite in Buckingham Palace, he or she wants to know the truth of the revelation that saves from wickedness, and not some philosophy masquerading as revelation or a revelation watered down into a culturally palatable human philosophy.
Of course, revelation requires that God exists and can and has communicated to humanity the way to overcome wickedness and death, which proceeds from it.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org
https://www.youtube.com/@emmanuelcharlesmccarthy3292
“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!
Hosanna in the highest!
Blessed is He, Who comes in the Name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!”
