Barry’s Bay, Ontario, October 4, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In his talk to the annual meeting of LifeSiteNews staff this summer, Canadian author, artist, essayist and lecturer Michael D. O’Brien spoke of his travels in various countries in Europe over the past year meeting with leaders in the culture wars who all had the same message. “To encapsulate it in a thumbnail would be to say everyone is fighting a battle to the death with a dictatorship of moral relativism,” he said.
“Confusion is created everywhere through media. Media is the primary shaper of consciousness of our times. In every nation it was the primary worry of apostolic people—clerics as well as lay apostles. The unprecedented power of film and television is something we Christians have never had to deal with before on this scale. So new strategies are being initiated everywhere in every country that I went”
“Everywhere there is the sense of facing a Goliath, a monster that feeds or is driven by money, profit and an underlying agenda of social revolution on a scale I don’t think we have ever seen before in the history of man. What we are looking at is the dismantling of the great treasure Christianity gave Western civilization.”
“When I was in Italy, I had the most awesome privilege of meeting the fiction writer in his 80’s named Eugenio Corti. His name is being touted around for the Nobel Prize in literature, but I don’t think that is going to happen.”
O’Brien asked Corti: ‘Do you have a word of advice for me?.’ “He leaned forward and he took my hand and he said, ‘We are at war. We are at war and we will be at war until the end of time. Cling to Jesus—through everything that is about to happen.’”
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“If I could say anything to you who work at LifeSiteNews, dear friends and courageous knights, I would urge you to remember always, in whatever portion of the war that we have been given to fight, that we are fighting against unseen enemies—the invisible enemies—what St. Paul calls the principalities and powers of darkness.”
“If your task is primarily for the promotion of the Gospel of Life, you are going to be confronting the unseen adversary, Satan, in his primary assault on mankind. He is, as Jesus says, the Father of Lies, a murderer from the beginning. He brought death into the world. This, we must keep in mind whenever we confront those human beings who are his agents, both knowingly and unknowingly (and I would think that probably almost all of them unknowingly cooperate with evil on this scale).”
“There are some dreadful final battles to come and they will be perhaps among the worst in the history of man. There will be many more casualties. Our task is primarily to help awaken people to the nature of the war and to reduce the number of casualties, and to even be instrumental in bringing forth more beautiful souls who will live with us in eternity. We must keep in mind always the real horizon, the eternal horizon, the vision of the truth that the Lord has won.”
“It is His war.”
“Recall that throughout the entire salvation history the Lord prefers to choose the small and the weak of the earth to confound all the powers of the enemy.”
“This is why God does not simply drop overwhelming spiritual and material resources into the laps of those who will serve Him in this great war.”
“The Lord himself will win the final battles of this war, through our weakness and absolute dependence upon Him, regardless of what is happening all around us, regardless of the amount of defeat we suffer.”
“You have seen some extraordinary victories through LSN this past year, in the defense of life and a confounding of the compromise of the Church in Canada. To my mind, you have managed to do that by taking a lot of flak, human malice and false judgement, as well as less visible spiritual attacks. And you have done it without retaliating in kind to your human accusers, those who would negate the voice of LifesiteNews by spreading falsehood against you.”
“Here at this late stage of the West we see an eclipse, a darkening, a loss, a massive apostasy, and at the same time we see an extraordinary new upwelling of hope, a new springtime that has already begun in the midst of darkness. The future is already among us, the victory is already approaching its final moments. How long that will be, we do not know. Our task is to keep doing what we do and to trust that the battle belongs to God.”
These are only a few excerpts of O’Brien’s remarks, see the full talk, A battle to the death against moral relativism, here.