Eastertide reaches it’s climax with two mysteries that both lift up our eyes to the skies and draw down from the heavens the fire that will light up the earth: Ascension and Pentecost. Together these two mysteries fulfil the meaning of Jacob’s ladder [Genesis 28:10-28] for now we can ascend with Christ the King and the fire of heaven can descend upon all who dwell upon the earth. But as always the fallen world ruled by its dark winged princes have sought to ape this by building two towers.

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” [Act 1:6-11]

The Ascension reveals the enthronement of Christ the King in heaven which now incorporates the earth but in and through the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ and the Kingdom of Christ - the Church! Christ is king here and now and not just at the end of time with his Second Coming. As Christ is revealed to us as now seated at the right hand of God the Father in heaven, so the Church is revealed as the spearpoint of Our Lord’s empire on earth on the day of Pentecost.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” [Acts 2:1-12]

The story of Pentecost is the divine response and the antidote to the dark story of the tower of Babel [Gen 11:1-9]. Not surprisingly it is one of the readings we can use for the Vigil Mass of Pentecost:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” [Genesis 11: 1-4].

Here we find that story whereby fallen man seeks to build his own empire and kingdom without God and indeed seeks to build it on the foundations of making himself God - Homo Deus!

Of course everytime man engages in this project of self-divinination or transhumanism by his own efforts, his hubris becomes his own undoing:

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused [hebrew - balel] the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth [Genesis 11:5-9].

The point being is that God alone can unite the nations and the nations can only be united when they are united to God in heart, mind, body and soul. It is for this purpose that the Catholic Church has been created and divinely instituted with the powers to bring about this salvation of the human race and it is for this reason that the Catholic Church is called the Sacrament of Salvation as it makes visible to the ends of the earth and till the end of time how God saves human beings in and through the life, death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.

However, as in the days of Genesis and the days of king Nimrod, so it has been down through history and is now specially visible in today’s world - man always attempts to bring about a anti-Christ form of political unity by force, law and control of human necessities? Salvation of mankind requires free will and intellectual assent but the worldly powers always seek to subvert or destroy liberty and truth. So it is that we hear of people calling truth a ‘racist concept’ and calling reason as something ‘right wing’! Consequently, we are being polarised and divided right down the middle between the way of reason and the way of unreason: there is now the way of the truth versus the way of my truth; the way of debate versus the way of compliance; the way of science and the way of anti-science; the way of God and the way of no-God! The Way of Freedom versus the Way of the Hive - truly we are now entering into the age of Aquarius!

However, there is something even more perturbing. Something more perturbing than visions of Hell, more perturbing than visions of astronomical chastisement, more perturbing than visions of the divine illumination of everyone’s conscience as to the state of their soul before God. Something that Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco found just so perturbing and it is the discovery so overwhelming that they cried out for there was coming a day when we will have two towers of great evil: the Tower of Sauron and the Tower of Saruman! The tower of Sauron today is built in the world by the neo-Nephilim, their children and their servants. And the tower of Saruman is being built within the domain of the children of men, the children of Adam, among the children of God, indeed within the Church itself - what the prophets for our times call the Great Apostasy! Here is the unholy horror of the Great Apostasy, namely, that bishops, clergy and laity are divided and many are led by a modern Saruman!

“So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), [Matt 25:14].

In Japan in 1973, Our Lady appeared to a nun three times and on October 13th she told Sr. Agnes Sasagawa the following:

October 13, 1973

"My dear daughter, listen well to what I have to say to you. You will inform your superior."

After a short silence:

"As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and priests."

"The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres...churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord, [see: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/message-from-our-lady--akita-japan-5167 ].

Despite this many in the Church do not see what is happening in front of them and many do not see the kind of evil that is abroad in the world either. Indeed, many have a naive teenager optimism about the goodness of the world and so Church, Mass, Confession and Heaven, Purgatory and Hell do not seem so important or so necessary. But they are! They are very necessary as this is a broken world, with broken creatures and broken lives and we need to realise that only a powerful force, moved by a a red tongued fire and a powerful hurricane like wind can overturn it and overcome it. Watch this trailer on an example of this fight that we are called to engage like a St George and the dragon for otherwise we too will end up serving the darkness in and around us: ‘Sound of Freedom’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZiCNnpUxng&ab_channel=AngelStudios .

The Church in holding to her 2000 year history of traditions, rites and structure is that force, a divinely animated force, that alone can defeat this darkness; but the Church that surrenders this patrimony of the past and conforms itself to the zeitgeist and like a teenager flirts and falls for the the modern world, cannot do this. It is an apostate church that ape’s the real thing, and in doing so it must suppress the real thing, the Catholic thing.

But the Catholic thing is the Catholic Church and it is no flirt, no ape and no teenager before the modern world and the clergy or the laity that spouts about modernising the Church or sells a new theology, a new liturgy or a new reality or proclaims the gospel of the world in the heart of the Church knows nothing about the Catholic thing. It is G K Chesterton who has put it best:

There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them...”

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.  The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves ... “Why I Am A Catholic”, pages 23–24.

The dark tower of Mordor is at its most terrifying when it corrupted the white tower of Saruman. Today, we see the rise of the tower of Saruman in the heart of the Church and the prophets for our times (Ecuador [1594; Fatima [1917], Garabandal [1961], Akita [1973]) have been pointing this out for decades but it has fallen on deaf ears.

Watch Timothy J Gordon’s discussion with Fr Alex Crow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azAvzh_talQ&ab_channel=TimothyGordon