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NO FINER TIME FOR FAITHFUL CATHOLICS, SAYS RUSE

We live in a time of massive evil, said Dr. Austin Ruse.

Yet, there has never been a finer time to be a faithful Catholic, he told the Delaware Pro-Life Coalition Convention in Claymont, Del., April 1.

Ruse said that as president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), which works to influence United Nations actions, “I have traveled all over the world, and whenever I go, I see catastrophe.”

We have seen a $10 billion pornography epidemic sweep our country.

Worldwide, thousands of children have been used as sex slaves.  Two and a half billion people can’t get a clean glass of water or access basic sanitation.

We see efforts by homosexuals to change the meaning of marriage.  Enormous numbers of heterosexuals forego marriage altogether, or forsake their marriage.

“We see diseases advance like monsters, diseases that can be easily cured, like malaria,” said Ruse.

“The greatest human rights disaster of all – abortion – takes the lives of millions and millions of children each year.

“And we see the deliberate killing of unborn girls at rates so high that it’s changing the demographic make-up of entire countries.”

Turning to our Church, we see apostasy within our own ranks:  significant numbers of Catholics blithely ignoring the Church’s teachings.

And we have seen some of our clergy preying on teenage boys, and dioceses go bankrupt paying for it.

“We may be tempted, like Lot’s wife, to stare so intently at all this evil that we will not want to get out of bed except to work, shop and play golf,” Ruse warned.

“But I say, never has there been a finer time to be a faithful Catholic, because all of us are so badly needed.

“There is so much to be done!  The Lord has given us specific tasks to do, and if we don’t do them, they won’t get done.”

Against this backdrop of great evil, said Ruse, stand the great saints of our lifetime:  Padre Pio, Mother Teresa, Maximilian Kolbe, Josemaria  Escriva, John Paul the Great.

“We can also take heart that the recent dark days of the Church are receding.  Fr. Richard John Neuhaus called it the Long Lent:  the great suffering brought on by aberrant priests.”

But the Holy Spirit can’t be kept down; new, good men are coming to the seminaries.

And the events of the last three years are enough to take our breath away, said Ruse.

“Within a year of those awful events, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out – a uniquely Catholic vision, a global Catholic event that sent people back to Mass and Confession.”

Then we saw the final moments of John Paul II.

“He showed us how to suffer and how to die.  Hundreds of millions of people all over the world watched, and then stayed around to see who the new pope would be.”

When the white smoke rose and the bells rang, those hundreds of millions ran to their TV sets to hear the news, he said.

At the United Nations, C-FAM “has worked hammer and tongs” to fight radical feminist efforts to redefine the family, redefine gender, and promote abortion “rights” throughout the world.

“They never give up, and neither do we, and so far, they have failed,” said Ruse.

Pope John Paul said that this new century would be a great Christian century – a great springtime of the faith.

We will not live to see this new age that is waiting to be born, Ruse predicted.

 “But Catholics in the great age to come will look back at this generation with envy, as a time of great danger and great fermentation of the Faith, a time of great saints and spiritual giants, a time when each faithful Catholic – each one of us – was so badly needed.”