FAST FOOD AD 2026, Thirty-Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD AD 2026, Thirty-Fifth Helping

I know of an Irish fellow, as staunch a Catholic as ever walked on God’s green earth, who professes his commitment to the faith by muscularly telling anyone who would listen, “I’d work with the devil himself if he would help me get the #@%&x bloody Brits out of Ireland.” This understanding of the Catholic faith is the modus operandi of the war-justifying Constantinian Churches—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical. It is likewise a presentation of the grand spiritual illusion that is the tragic flaw that has bedeviled for the last 1700 years these war justifying Churches, preventing them from being what Jesus wants them to be, namely, an extension in words, deeds and spirit of Him, His Truth, His Love and His Way in time and space.

“I’d work with the devil himself if he would help me get the #@%x&! bloody Brits out of Ireland,” is such a ludicrous approach to living the life that Jesus intends His disciples to live, that it would be thought mad, if it were not the normalized, ordinary and accepted daily approach to living the Christian life of 98% Churches of Christianity. For the violence justifying Churches, the devil’s ways and means are the default ways and means in small and large matters when Christlike love seems to fail or appears to be failing or is not even tried because the Christian believes it is powerless to be of substantive help and will certainly fail with the crisis situation with which he or she is confronted here and now, e.g. straightening out a chronically disobedience child or straightening out Putin.

But our Irish lad above differs from the Churches and Christians noted above on one very pertinent point: He admits to being willing to work with the devil. The violence and war justifying Constantinian Churches, however, use the devil’s ways and means and then embrace wholeheartedly the spirit of the “Father of lies” and spend every day of their existences teaching people that burning people to death, that strangling people, that slitting the throats of people, that disemboweling people, that decapitating people, that hating enemies, that murdering and maiming people in mind, spirit, body and soul are morally acceptable ways of following Jesus and doing God’s will as revealed by Jesus, provided only that a Trump or a Zelensky or a Netanyahu or some other “King of the Hill” tells the Christian to do it.

These Churches’ leadership and laity, then never have to face up to the fact—and repent of the fact—that the ways and means they are using and supporting are Satan’s ways and means, the direct opposite of the ways and means revealed by Jesus as the eternal will of their “Father in heaven.”

But a sin left unnamed or its moral equivalent, a sin called good, multiplies itself with lavish zeal in the future and far beyond any calculations available to human consciousness. Such is the unimaginable and unfathomable power of the mystery of iniquity. And so, as war itself releases all the evils of hell into the world in superabundance, so also the justification and support of war by the Constantinian Churches releases a gaggle of other evil spirits from hell into every level of these Churches’ institutional structures, operations and thinking.

The historical evidence of this insidious trickle-down effect of evil on the internal operation, administration and personnel of the Churches that justify their members participating in violence and war is wide ranging, patent and profound. As it is impossible for a Christian to kill a person without killing something in himself or herself, so also it is impossible for a Christian Church to justify its members taking part in the mass destruction of people that war entails, and not kill something in itself. The internal and external history of the institutional Church after its first 300 years is proof positive of this. 

If a Christian community constructs an institutional Church on the model of the Roman state it necessarily must be operated by the methods and the means a state employs, namely, violence, deceit, betrayal, corruption, propaganda, the lust for power, fear, etc. Speaking for my own Constantinian institutional Church, the Catholic Church, this is pretty much how it has operated since the fourth century until today.

A stalwart Catholic, not hampered by much more than an elementary awareness of Church history, might object by rightfully noting that to be a Catholic one must believe that the Church is indefectibly Holy. True! But to be a Catholic one does not have to believe its personnel is indefectibly holy. In fact, I think I would be on safe ground to say that all its personnel are sinners, as I am a sinner, with all the propensity for more sin that can be found universally in the human condition. 

So, depending on the environment in which a sinful, concupiscent ridden human being lives, he or she will accordingly adapt to it. Put a person into an institutional military training operation and he or she will follow the logic of that institution and become what they have to become to survive in that institution. Put a person in an institution constructed according to the model of a dictatorial state and he or she will be formed and form themselves according to the norms and logic such an institution demands for its survival and their survival. 

If a Christian finds him or herself in an institution whose logic and norms require living in a way contrary to the Way of Jesus, they must either leave the institution, refuse to adhere to those particular methods of operation that are opposed to Jesus’ teachings or stay. The task for the Christian if he or she stays, then becomes to re-brand the devil’s ways and means as “Christian,” to tag evil as good, to sin against the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit and continue to collect whatever earthly benefits that institution has to offer.

The consequence of this labeling of evil as good is that one never has to do the only thing God needs us to do to be forgiven one time or 70X7 times, which is to want forgiveness. One never asks forgiveness for doing good! One never repents for doing good! And so, the unnamed evil or the evil designated as good perpetuates itself indefinitely into the future with lavish zeal with forgiveness neither wanted nor sought. There is a name for this type of sin against the Spirit of Truth in the Gospels.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

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“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.

Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!

Hosanna in the highest!