Tirian, last king of Narnia, accompanied by the children of our world, Eustace and Jill, meets a group of Narnian dwarfs being driven off to slavery in the Tisroc’s mines. He stops them and the dwarfs’ Calormene soldier guards do not question him since the king and his companions are in disguise.

He asks the dwarfs why they are going so quietly off to die in the salt mines of Pugrahan.

The two soldiers glared at him in surprise, but the dwarfs all answered, “Aslan’s orders. Aslan’s orders. He’s sold us. What can we do against him?” 

“Look,” said Tirian, pulling Puzzle forward into the light. “It has all been a lie. Aslan has not come to Narnia at all. You have been cheated by the Ape. This is the thing he brought out of the stable to show you. Look at it.”

The king pulls Puzzle the donkey, still dressed untidily in his lion-skin coat and the dwarfs see that they have been deceived by the Ape, Shift.

The Calormene soldiers challenge Tirian, who replies in a great and kingly voice, “This is my password. The light is dawning. The lie is broken. Now guard thee, miscreant, for I am Tirian of Narnia.”

The king and Eustace throw down their enemies in a brief fight, and declare to the former prisoners, “You are free!”

“Tomorrow I will lead you to free all Narnia. Three cheers for Aslan!”

Then something happens that the faithful Narnians would never have suspected could possibly happen: the lies of the Ape have created a mind of unbelief in the dwarfs. They reject the true Aslan because they have been shown of the Ape’s false construct.

The dwarfs all looked at one another with grins; sneering grins, not merry ones. 

“Well,” said the dwarf, whose name was Griffle, “I don’t know how all you chaps feel, but I feel as if I’ve heard as much about Aslan as I want to for the rest of my life.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” growled the other dwarfs. “It’s all a plant, a bloomin’ plant.” 

“What do you mean,” said Tirian. He had not been pale when he was fighting but he was pale now. He had thought this was going to be a beautiful moment, but it was turning out more like a bad dream.

“You must think we’re bloomin’ soft in the head, that you must,” said Griffle. “We’ve been taken in once, and now you expect us to be taken in again next minute. We’ve no more use for stories about Aslan, see. Look at him, an old moke with long ears!” 

“By heaven you make me mad!” said Tirian. “Which of us said that was Aslan? That is the Ape’s imitation of the real Aslan. Can’t you understand?” 

“And you’ve got a better imitation I suppose,” said Griffle. “No thanks. We’ve been fooled once and we’re not going to be fooled again.” 

“I have not,” said Tirian angrily. “I serve the real Aslan.” 

“Where’s he? Who’s he? Show him to us!” said several dwarfs.

“Do you think I keep him in my wallet, fools?” said Tirian. “Who am I that I could make Aslan appear at my bidding? He’s not a tame lion.” 

The moment those words were out of his mouth he realised he had made a false move. The dwarfs at once began repeating, “Not a tame lion. Not a tame lion,” in a jeering sing-song. “That’s what the other lot kept on telling us.” 

“I don’t think we want anymore kings, no more than we want any Aslans. We’re going to look after ourselves from now on and touch our caps to nobody, see?” 

… and off they tramped into the darkness.

~

It’s very simple; Tirian and the children are Catholics who never lost faith, who always understood that the lies and crimes of the Ape could do nothing to erase the reality of Aslan. But they are also unaware of just how far gone many, many of their fellow Narnians are already, long before the Ape ever found the lion skin.

Shift the Ape is the pope of the modernists, using the well-known expression, “not a tame lion” – the God of surprises – to dupe those whose faith is already weakened by decades of laxity into believing that Aslan can be something opposed to his own nature, that Aslan could be not-Aslan – that water could be dry water, and the sun a black sun.

Shift has created his puppet-Aslan, showing it to the weakened Narnians every night and demanding utter obedience. This false god of surprises is in reality an anti-rational lie, as we see later in the story when the heresy deepens and Shift starts to say that Aslan and Tash are one and the same. In reality, Shift neither believes nor disbelieves in Tash or Aslan or his own lies about both. The truth or falsehood of these things is of no consequence to him. They are tools; their purpose is to first confuse and then subjugate the Narnians. Shift isn’t interested in Aslan or in Tash; Shift the Ape is interested in himself.

He will remake Narnia into a new country, one he likes better, with “oranges and bananas pouring in – and roads and big cities and schools and offices and whips and muzzles and saddles, and cages and kennels and prisons…”

And Shift the Pope has created a puppet-Christ of his own, and trots it out every day, claiming ever more insane things of it – as though he is testing how far he can push before a significant number of Catholics refuses to follow. And every time, every outrage, is met in the commboxes with little other than never-ending streams of fervent “Amen”s and gushing praise. What has he learned from his five years of blasphemies and lies? That Catholics are as faithless under the veneer as he is.

What has he said? He has said Christ sinned against His parents. He said that Christ and the Father and the Holy Ghost are all at odds “behind closed doors,” holding up only a false front of unity. He has said mortal sin is not really what we had always been told it was – making Christ a liar – and that those who die in it merely disappear. And in the midst of these horrific blasphemies, he has set himself up as another, better Christ, with a new moral law that will be much more to everyone’s liking.

He has corrected, upbraided and denied Jesus Christ, God the Father and the Holy Ghost, and he seems especially fond of insulting the Blessed Mother of God, Mary most holy. He has told sinners to keep sinning, and excoriated and condemned those who strive for holiness. He has called Good evil and evil good. And all in the name of the very Christ he has blasphemed.

Shift the pope, however, is only the culmination of the problem. How did we get him? How did this creature get elected? We know now, of course, that he was put in place quite deliberately (though it is an open question whether even the “St. Gallen Mafia” really understood what they were getting) in order to do these things. In the end, we see that Shift the Pope is at bottom a puppet, who could never have come to power to begin with if Narnia had not come to a time of great systemic weakness. The Church was plunging to unprecedented lows – never in 2000 years had so many who continued to call themselves Catholics been so faithless.

And that brings us to the terrible scene above. Tirian the king of Narnia didn’t know his subjects had become so weakened, he had no idea the dwarfs were so ready to apostatise. And here’s where we are in real trouble. Catholics who are now being confronted with the disgusting reality of the thing they have been duped into following, not only for 5+ years but for 50+, are in no condition to rally to the side of truth.

The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report is all anyone is talking about. Two weeks ago it was Uncle Ted McCarrick’s decades-long career as a homosexual rapist that was all anyone was talking about. One by one these vampires who have been living among us disguised as churchmen are being dragged into the sunlight, their lifetimes of lying being revealed for everyone to see.

But what is the reaction going to be? Are people truly “waking up”? Are most pew-sitting Catholics – most of whom only warm a pew a few times a year at most – coming at last to their senses, putting together the things these men have been saying and the things we now know, and coming to reasonable conclusions?

A very long time ago I thought we only had to tell people the truth, and they would see and know and throw the evil down. I thought all we had to do was show them Puzzle in his lion skin, and the dwarfs would rally to the side of Aslan. I had a few unpleasant lessons to learn, one of the most important of which is that they don’t really want to be free.

This is the moment of decision for many Catholics, but I think it’s not going to be the right one. Because – here’s the rub – the lies of men like McCarrick and Wuerl have been believed willingly, eagerly, by nearly all who can still be bothered to call themselves Catholics. And it doesn’t take a great theologian to see the connections that must now be getting made in their minds: “If McCarrick was the prelate who told me every day that as a Catholic I could believe X, and do Y, and he has been revealed to be a monstrous psychopathic deceiver, then perhaps I can’t believe X or do Y. But I’ve based my whole life on believing X and doing Y, and damned if I’m going to change now…”

Every one of these men lied not only about their sexual activities, but about the Faith. These perverts who used their positions, who manipulated the truth in order to acquire victims for their horrific acts, were apostates themselves. They duped the Catholic world into believing things about God and morality and the Catholic religion that – should the logic be followed – must also be strongly condemned. That, I believe, is why “logic” was the first thing to be eradicated in their minds. It was against this day that the Devil, through his neo-modernist ecclesiastical minions, started the campaign of feelings-over-truth in the Church that Shift the Pope has now made official Church teaching. The anti-rational principles behind Amoris Laetitia have been entrenched in the Catholic mind for decades.

And make no mistake about their feelings: people really, really want to believe it. They want to believe the things McCarrick and Mahoney and Weakland and Hunthausen and Remi de Roo and Wuerl and all the rest had been telling them all these years. They want to believe that there are no rules, most especially that sexual activity outside marriage is OK with God. They want to believe that abortion is just a matter of personal choice. They want to believe divorce is a sad but acceptable necessity. They want to believe that contraception is something no one should really be bothered over using.

They want to believe, most especially, that God is the way Jorge Bergoglio says he is. They want to believe, most especially, that their sexual sins will not land them in hell, that God is some kind of senile uncle instead of a divine Judge, that He can change His mind, change the rules to fit “the times”. They want to believe they can receive Holy Communion in an unrepented state of their favourite mortal sin. They were told for decades by the McCarricks and the Wuerls that mortal sin just… didn’t count. Wasn’t a thing.

Catholics of our time are the dwarfs of Narnia in the last days. They have already replaced the Creed of the Church with their own, and it looks remarkably like the one being taught every day by Shift the Pope and his friends. They are already committed to a path of radical unbelief, already committed to the anti-rational mindset in which there are no such things as contradictions. They already believe, not that Tash and Aslan are one, but that both are humbug.

Catholics who think that there will be cries from the crowd in Dublin of “Answer the Dubia!” and “Burn Amoris Laetitia!” – as our friend Eccles suggested on Twitter today – are gravely overestimating the kind of Catholics who would attend an event like the World Meeting of Families. As our friend Deb Gyapong put it: “Another majority among those who have had it with the sex abuse crisis are those who think the cause is celibacy & homophobia creating self-hating priests who act out. They think the solution is: married priests, women ‘priests,’ and openly gay priests, allowed to marry.”

“…the clerical abuse crisis is ALREADY being constricted to the narratives that enabled it in the first place.”

These Narnian apostate dwarfs are ready. They’ve been prepared all their lives to go to Dublin and renounce Christ, endorse the New Sexual Paradigm that was proposed at the Synods, codified by Amoris Laetitia, and will probably be confirmed at the WMOF. They’re convinced of their righteousness, having been told all their lives how oppressed they had been under the Old Paradigm, and how just is their cause now that they are being offered the blessing of God on their perversions.

The contradiction – of clamouring for the resignation of the disgraced McCarricks and Wuerls for their perversions on one side of their mouths while shouting for the pope to endorse homosexuality out of the other – will never occur to them. All contradictions have been wiped clean from their minds. Such things are “rigid”. We must move beyond them, beyond Good and Evil. This is the current year; Tash and Aslan are both one and not one, because, in fact, both are humbug, and only the human will really exists.

 

“They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

 

~