Happy New Year!? Revellers of Janus, Catholic Devotion to Mary the Mother of God & Pol Pot!
Happy New Year to you all! The month of January is named after the Roman god, Janus, who was the god of gates and doors [ianua in Latin]; and so he is also the two faced god that captures New Year’s eve. He is the two faced god where one face faced the year just gone and the other face faced the year to come. As we enter the new Year of 2022 with firework displays painting the night sky, we find that the pagan god Janus walks among the night revellers, whilst Catholics walk into the day, the day that is the 1st January, the first day of this new year. And on this day they ponder Mary as the Mother of God.
Our Lady as the God-bearer [Theotokos] and as the Gate of heaven [Ianua caeli], is also the nexus where the old creation is transfigured by the coming of Christ who will bring about a new creation. Mary, is therefore the gateway for God to enter our world and also the gateway for us to enter God’s world, the Kingdom of Heaven.
Our Lady, as the Mother of God, is the ark of the new Covenant and the first tabernacle of Christ but she is also the heart and memory of the Church for ‘she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart’ and these things, that she both pondered and treasured, were the events and happenings surrounding the conception, the birth, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. As John the Baptist stood on the boundary of the old and new Covenants, Our Lady is the matrix for both the old and new for she neither sacrifices the Old for the New nor sacrifices the New for the Old. Rather she treasures them and she ponders them in her heart and she thus becomes the icon of Sacred Tradition as she represents the living and active memory of the Church [Sacred Tradition is also the living presence of Christ in the Church]. If we lose our memory we lose our identity, so the Church has always known how vital and necessary it is for her to keep the deposit of faith found in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scipture. She too has treasured this Sacred Tradition and pondered it in her heart and mind, and handed it on to the following generations. And the Catholic Church has followed Our Lady, who is the icon of this work, for nearly 2 millennia.
However, in 1984 there was an important film released starring Sam Waterson, Haing S Ngor and John Malkovich and directed by Roland Joffe called The Killing Fields. It depicted what happened to Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge under the tyrant Pol Pot created carnage and genocide as it sought to destroy the history of the people of Cambodia by calling for a total restart, a total reset, which he called ‘Year Zero!’
As a young man I found this film struck deep into me, into both my heart and mind, about the real evils that communism exercised as it sought to put its vision into reality no matter what the cost. In this film I beheld the cruelty of such ideological fanatics. Today, unbelievably, we are seeing the rise of these Zero fanatics in politics under the woke culture and critical race theory and the Great Reset; they all want to throw away the past and start all over again in realising the conceptual abstractions that make up what is for them a Utopia, but for the rest of us it would be a Dystopia. They want to begin here and now and they are impatient to get it done so they want to do it no matter what the cost!
Yet, I am afraid this error first surfaced in the Catholic Church and it is called Modernism. As a young student of theology at University and a practising Catholic in the mid 1980s I heard both clergy and laity espouse this idea of Year Zero! Such clergy and laity believed and championed the following idea that everything before Vatican II must be dumped in order to upgrade or to modernise the Church. Their motto was that the “Church must move with the times!” Consequently, we saw the killing fields of faith happen all over the Church as churches were disordered, catechisms dumped, Mass reduced to creative liturgies made up of modern music and gimicks and the repression of dissenters. Unsurprisingly, there was a mass exodus of both young and old from the Church when such Pol Pot theologians, clerics and lay people desacralised the life of the Catholic Church and threw away her traditions.
So, the Killing fields is still a very good image for what we now see emerging even today, in The Great Reset, namely, Pol Pot Politics, Pol Pot Economics, Pol Pot Cultural critiques, Pol Pot Environmentalism as well as Pol Pot theology. For them the killing fields of Cambodia under the Pol Pot Regime is their model for how to deal with history, tradition, authority, liberty, economics, religion, politics, culture…and dissenters! Collapse and tear the whole Western culture and society down and then build, back better! Time for all of us to wake up and smell…not the roses…but the rotten corpses!
All this is a long, long, long way from Our Lady’s example of treasuring, pondering and handing on the beauty, glory and wonder of Christ and the Life in Christ. It is a long, long, long way from the call to the Church to be like Mary, to be a Mother. A Mother who does not abort her children; nor desecrate their souls; nor distort their bodies; nor pollute her sanctuaries with pagan idols; nor deprive her faithful children of the fulness of the Catholic Faith whilst rewarding those unfaithful Catholics with applause, support and beneficence; nor surrender the life of the Church to the spirit of the age by preaching the Gospel of the World in the heart of the Church!
Janus gives us the intoxicated but blind Revellers; Pol Pot gives us the Spoilers who fill the ditches of history with bones of the slaughtered; but Our Lady, the Mother of God, gives us back all the treasures of the Catholic Faith. Our Lady invites us to ponder with her the traditions of the Catholic Faith, and so preserve, conserve and hand them on for they are our memories without which we would lose our identities as Catholics. Modernists sacrifice the past for the present and become extinct in the future; faithful Catholics hold the past and the present together and theirs is the future for that is the very definition of hope. The optimist sacrifices the past for the future; the pessimist sacrifices the future for the past; a Catholic, as a witness to Hope, holds the past, the present and the future together for the past and the present point out, like a lighthouse, the way to the future. For the Church does not move with the times, rather She is to move the times, to critique the times and to direct the times in the right direction which is God’s direction!
Our Lady, Mother of God, pray for us; Our Lady, Gate of Heaven, pray for us; Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, pray for us; Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us; Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
During these days, when so much uncertainty is being visited on the people both in the Church and in the State, we have sought to spend time praying the rosary, adoring the blessed sacrament and offering up our trials, sufferings and afflictions in response to the Effatha 'World Wide' initiative; join us in this intiative and pray for the following intentions during these times before the Lord:
The end of Covid;
All who have suffered due to the Covid situation;
The world to be re-opened;
Hearts to be opened to God and others;
The coming of the Kingdom of God to overcome the kingdom of Satan and the culture of death;
Restoration, Reparation and Conversion.
