by PAUL COLLITS – IT ISN’T every day that a church sermon has you sitting up (metaphorically) taking notes.
Sadly, many priests these days see opportunities for “innovation” not in the preparation of their homilies but rather in butchering the rest of the Mass.
- We have a duty to identify, root out and destroy systemic corruption.
- Righteous anger is okay. Especially anger at corruption.
- Jesus may very well be on the side of those who push back against the corrupt State.
The Catholics of Lismore have been blessed with powerful, traditional organ-driven liturgical music, reverent priests, black letter theology and truly beautiful Cathedral architecture.
In these post-Vatican II times, it is almost old school high Anglican. Not coincidentally, it may all have more than a little to do with the recent, sixteen-year tenure as Bishop of Geoffrey Jarrett, a cradle Anglican.
REMOVING
Bible scholars, cradle Christians and casual readers with a scriptural bent will be familiar with the story of Jesus angrily removing the money lenders and market produce sellers from “His Father’s House”.
Today I heard things I didn’t know and had not heard before. And the resonance for our times was striking.
The traditional narrative has Jesus righteously angry with those turning the Temple into a market place. He kicked them out, with force, and told them and everyone else why.
When questioned on what authority He did this, He explained that He could destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days. The Easter events occurring shortly thereafter proved Him to be speaking the truth.
But there is a back story. As I discover.
It wasn’t just about the commercialisation of a sacred space. It turns out that the High Priest-endorsed sellers were a protected, corrupt cartel, ripping off those who travelled from far away to the Holy City for the Passover and were in need of purchasing animals to slaughter. They were extracting a premium. Like supermarkets, they were price gouging.
They were scammers! Monopolists. Corrupt.
Who knew? The Son of God was pushing back against scamming. Deo gratias.
There were three reasons why Jesus was so angry in the Temple.
The offence to His Father (of course). The destruction of reverence for those who were there at the Temple to worship and pray (God help Catholics in many parishes today). And the corruption and hypocrisy of it all.
The homilist suggested that Jesus was most (repeatedly) angry in the Gospels about hypocrisy. Which might be reassurance to those of us who sin massively in other areas.
LESSON
The lesson for us? Righteous anger is okay. Especially anger at corruption.
Anger directed at evil and used for positive good is not just acceptable, it is needed and essential.
Perhaps most important of all, we have a duty to identify, root out and destroy systemic corruption.
Which brings us, neatly, to the corruption all around us in our own times. Jesus may well be on the side of the whistleblower. And those who push back against the corrupt State.
I hope so.
Edward Snowden. Julian Assange. Daniel Ellsberg (he of the Pentagon papers in the 1960s). The COVID medic-warriors. The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. Gerard Rennick and the others of the COVID Five. Tucker Carlson. Peter McCullough. Andrew Bridgen. The freedom micro Parties. Mark Steyn and the climate scam hunters. The critics of pork barrelling.
As Easter 2024 approaches, it may be appropriate to reflect on the public corruption of our age and the indifference to it from voters and the media.
The list of corrupt actions in our time is long and ghastly:
- Some of it falls under Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”. Following orders, like Adolph Eichmann.
- Bureaucrats who look the other way, to protect their jobs.
- NSW police officers who protected the Teacher’s Pet murderer and sex abuser, Chris Dawson.
- The bishops who “moved on” known sex offenders.
- Chief Health Officers who knew, or should have known, that COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates were killing people, as well as destroying their freedom.
- Academics who saw funding opportunities provided by Big Pharma research grants as the main game.
- Politicians who defended – yes, actually defended – pork barrelling as normal governance practice.
The policy scams of the age are legendary. Ponzi schemes. Money laundering exercises. Mass immigration. The Ukraine war. Net zero.
These lies are big lies. They cost trillions of dollars.
ScoMo’s COVID play comes to mind. He bet the whole Australian economy on anti-science, unproven, corrupt, bought-by-Big-Pharma bureaucratic advice. That he was clueless in the face of the system doesn’t excuse it.
Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) defines corruption as follows: Corruption is the misuse of public power, position or funds.
It can happen through:
- improper or unlawful actions,
- failure to act by public sector staff or agencies,
- people trying to improperly influence the functions or decisions of the public sector.
The most cursory examination of Victoria’s recent governance would have one raising eyebrows, on this definition.
There is petty corruption. Where politicians and others with one hand on the levers of power seek to enrich their bank accounts. Think Russ Hinze of the Joh days in 1980s Queensland.
Then there is systemic corruption. Think climate policy, or mass immigration, for example.
Where a whole cadre of ruling class operatives tell big lies that will impoverish the people in pursuit of a self-serving ideology.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, provides a good case study in the contrast of (small) private and (massive) public corruption.
Whatever the fate of his ongoing private corruption accusations, he did something much worse. He and his buddy Albert Boula, the CEO of Pfizer, together made the people of Israel a giant experimental lab for an untested, unnecessary, ineffective, dangerous vaccine. People died.
Bibi, as a vaccine evangelist, helped to set the scene for a massive, lethal, global lie. Now, that is corruption. By worldwide and historical standards, it doesn’t get much worse.
PETTY
Petty corrupt politicians are a minor and predictable problem. They all do it! We all saw the “rural independents”, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who sold their souls back in the early 2010s for hospital upgrades (in Tamworth) and dual carriageway roads (into Port Macquarie).
System corruption perpetrators, not so much.
The elites’ utterly successful project to embed a corrupt system with the public’s acquiescence has seen a profound transformation in our political culture.
The voting public is weakened, rendered irrelevant, feeling powerless in the face of the system and the endless offenders. Worst of all, voters seem to have a reached the conclusion, what can you do? Most do nothing.
Is corruption embedded in the democratic system?
The public choice theorists, like (Nobel Prize winners) James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, think so
Politicians have private interests, they say. They act on them. We all live with the consequences.
One of these is the easy acceptance of corporatism, the outsourcing of core government functions to the unelected, off-shoring, privatisation, and all the other core elements of de-democratisation. The militarisation of the polity.
Corrupting the very process of democracy is corruption, big time. It doesn’t get any bigger.
There is an ongoing debate over the role of, and need for, anti-corruption bodies like the NSW ICAC. Those who value the rule of law, like Chris Merritt, use rule of law arguments to castigate ICAC for its allegedly brutal methods. He calls it a “kangaroo court”.
My response to these well-meant arguments is always the same. Get rid of the political corruption, then we won’t need ICAC. Simple.
FALSE
When elections are corrupted by false promises and the ignoring by politicians of their “mandates”, perhaps the defenceless voter might well be thinking, ICAC is all we’ve got.
Our votes don’t change anything. Ever.
Look at Victoria (if you must). Its judicial system is corrupt, from top to bottom.
There is, seemingly, no electoral path to redemption when both branches of the “unity Party” agree on so much that is corrupt in the system.
When all the major Parties profit from its continuance. Look at Queensland in the 1980s. We needed a Tony Fitzgerald, then.
Everyone agreed on that, at the time. Unfortunately, we still do.
So, then, as now, there is corruption in the Temple. And righteous anger is the appropriate response.
We have a very good source on this. St John’s Gospel.PC
Paul
Changing govt depts into corporations has changed them from benign benevolence to actively and aggressively attacking the Australian people. ATO, Rob-debt and my area of interest, ABC’s Anne Connolly’s 4 Corners State Control, the abuse of the vulnerable and elderly.
Deut 32:32 For their vine is from the vine of Sodom, and from the the fields of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of poison, their clusters bitter. V33 their wine is the venom of serpents and the deadly poison of cobras.
All 3 levels of govt have become a real threat to the stability and security of our nation, they have turned from a sense of public duty and service to one of self interest, it defies reason which indicates this change has come from the Father of Lies. If a nation rejects God it will embrace the opposite and place itself under a curse.
Music to my ears, Paul: the miracle of a good sermon to unleash the power of understanding and call out the consequences of tolerating the intolerable for too long.
This is how the living God speaks to those with ears to hear and eyes to see — and in your case list in detail the sins given the green light by today’s majority Laodocean churches. Jesus spoke the same message through John of Patmos 2,000 years ago in just nine verses (Revelation 3: 14-22).
Jesus pushed back against rampant corruption by the Temple authorities of his day in a manner explicitly downplayed in our day by the World Council of Churches/UN cartel scheming to recast God in the communist-fascist mold of globalist useful puppet/influencer for their depopulation, planet destroying, transhuman agendas.
Yes, the vectors for “the list of corrupt actions in our time is long and ghastly” and, certainly in your Easter message take-away, of an order to remind us the prophetic last trumpet is about to sound.
Each and every one of us was born for this time, to suffer the stripes and wounds of global medical and climate tyranny if we let it prise us away from living our Christian faith; let it relinquish our grasp on Jesus’ powerful spiritual hand. He was and remains the Saviour for all times. Good or evil, life or death: you choose. The choice is forever binary.