Here's a bit of happy news

Ukrainian seminaries are so full they are turning people away.

Full to bursting seminaries is a nice problem for the Church to have.  Having lived through the worst that the 20th century has had to offer—Bolshevik Revolution, engineered famines, Stalin, Hitler, More Stalin, the full brunt of the two greatest forms of totalitarianism conceived by the mind of man, and now the aftermath of a dispirited and ruined civilization—it shouldn’t be too surprising that Ukrainians living in the wake of the dreadful catastrophe of man’s rejection of God should be turning back to him with zeal.

What is surprising, or at least not sane, is that the West, having witnessed all the horrors of the 20th century and paid in so much blood to stop them, should now be hell-bent on the rejection of God ourselves.  Sin does indeed make you stupid.  Having just had occasion to watch The 13th Day (a very fine film which I highly recommend), I am struck again by the warning our Lady gave the children at Fatima about the horrors which awaited the world if we did not repent, offer sacrifice, and consecrate ourselves to God—horrors which fell especially hard on the innocent suffering people of the Ukraine.  With the Pope having consecrated Russia (and indeed the world), the pall began to lift (as our Lady promised) twenty years ago.  But by no means is the story of the Church’s struggle with evil over—either in Russia nor here in the West where contempt for the gospel grows each day.  May God grant our increasingly depraved culture the spirit of repentance that we avoid the judgments the 20th century brought upon itself.  And may the people of the Ukraine fight for the salvation of the world as toughened veterans of some of Hell’s worst assaults.