Spearheading the Revolution in Hollywood: Mel Gibson's Latest Work of Genius

Today the first glimpse of Gibson's new film Apocalypto hit the web. Up to this point, we have only heard that the film is set about 500 years ago, in Aztec society and filmed almost entirely in the dead Aztec language. What could this be about? What happened about 500 years ago among the Aztecs that would be of any interest to us? What is the image of the Apocalypse that was and is so powerful today???

Here's a bit of a hint . . .


Could it be that Apocalypto is about Our Lady of Guadalupe as seen from the perspective of the Azetec Empire and those who opposed the vision that brought an end to this civilization?

Think about it for a moment . . .

What was Aztec civilization like when Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego? Here is a passage that describes the "civilization":

In the Americas, five centuries ago, cruel human sacrificing rituals were
performed in the Aztec empire. Between 20,000 and 50,000 were sacrificed a year. The rituals included cannibalism of the victims limbs. Most of them were
captives or slaves, and besides men they included women and children. The early
Mexican historian Ixtlilxochitl estimated that one out of every five children in
Mexico were sacrificed. The climax of these ritual killings came in 1487 for the
dedication of the new and richly decorated with serpents temple of
Huitzilopochtli, in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), when in a single ceremony
that lasted four days and four nights, with the constant beating of giant drums
made of snakeskin, the Aztec ruler and demon worshiper Tlacaellel presided the
sacrifice of more than 80,000 men.

How horrible and vile, yet this "great" civilization produced pyramids and profoundly accurate archeo-astronomy with a calendar system that is accurate up to the year 2012! The co-existence of great advances in science and learning with demonic culture is nothing new. We read about the empire of the Caininites who sacrificed their children to the demon Molech.

This co-existence of great advances and great depravity should come as no surprise to us in the United States. We murder somewhere in the range of 1.3 million babies in utero every year and call this "progress" and the advancement of women.

Like it or not, there are parallels between the Aztecs and our beloved United States of America. The Aztecs were the most technologically advanced empire in the Americas; today the US is that most advanced political and cultural power. The Aztecs had involved themselves in a demonic culture that had an unquenchable thirst for human sacrifice; in the US today, we will murder several thousand babies in the womb and we are living in what John Paul II called a "culture of death".

All cultures imply at the heart of it a ritual "cult", what is the cult behind America's current cultural fetishes? It isn't the Virgin Mary. If you Google the term "Molech", among the top level results is a disturbing link regarding just such a cult in American and Internationally. Yes, the site is managed by a conspiracy theory monger, so read it only with great discernment. Anyone who has read Michael O'Brien's novels published by Ignatius Press, will know what this is getting at.

The fascinating implication of Mel's new work, if indeed he is making a film about the end of a civilization as heralded by the Virgin of Guadalupe, is that the film would be an allegory of American civilization today. As Mel explores what a great civilization looks like at the height of its interior decay, he will be holding up a mirror or a kind of Portrait of Dorian Gray to the American soul. In being disgusted by what we see, we will be seeing ourselves.

The teaser using the following quote to set the subject matter of the film:

"A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within" - Will Durant

In the teaser, there is a shot of Aztecs with ornate body piercing and gaudy decorative embellishments upon them. It is reminiscent of the King Herod scene in the Passion - a glimpse of the decadency of a culture totally caught up in its own love of self - vanity. When stopping into my local coffee shop, the guy behind the counter has a similar ring through his nose and standing behind me is a women with obvious plastic surgery. This is a film as much about modern America as it is about the Aztecs.

Our country is experiencing a similar confrontation between the forces of life and the forces of death that the Aztecs must have experienced in the aftermath of Our Lady of Guadalupe's appearance. The Aztec powerful elite were not going to simply surrender - there was most likely a dramatic series of events before this demonic civilization was no more. Looking at Mel's teaser, it looks like this story is about those events. And if it is about those events, it is also about our time. Look at the great battles of civilization taking place today in America: the right to life, the right to freedom of religion, the attack on the family, etc. just open the paper or turn on the TV and it is obvious we are in a pitched culture war - a war of Cults and when it is all said and done, there are only two - Christ's and the Enemy's.

Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego and this serpentine culture was crushed. Some 9 million Aztecs converted to Catholicism in a matter of years (as the Church lost about 5 million due to the mis-adventures of Luther, Calvin & Co.). What we see in this amazing fact of history is a battle between the Virgin and the Dragon of Revelations/Apocalypse 12. Where we see a great battle between a women "clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" and a child devouring "huge red dragon." This is the epic battle that is fought in every heart and every generation, only at some times the battle becomes more obvious and apparent. The story of the fall of the Aztec Empire is the story of the victory of the Virgin and her son - the Lamb of God.

John Paul II named Our Lady of Guadalupe as the patroness of the New Evangelization. I think Mel is paying close attention. He is a member of God's Revolution, and that means he is putting himself out there. Let us all pray for him, because if this is indeed a story about the battle of the Apocalypse - the story of the fight between the demonic worldly powers of darkness and the power of a Virgin birth - then Mel Gibson will come under tremendous attack, both spiritual and mortal.

We must pray for him, it is the least we can do!

PS: If this film does turn out to be about Our Lady of Guadalupe, just think of the impact that will have on American Evangelical Christianity (who love Mel) - could this film make a further impact on growing current of flow across the Tiber and home to Rome? What impact will that have for the future of America and our World? Hope and Pray!

The Baptism of Capitalism

Distortions rather than distinctions rule in a culture of death. We hear about "unused in vitro production" rather than "embryonic human beings with unique DNA" in the stem-cell debate. We learn about "dying with their dignity" rather than "protecting human dignity" in the euthanasia debate. We are asked to feel compassion for the victims of "homophobia" but never hear about the life destroying effects of a homosexual lifestyle. Our culture is awash in distortions.

The latest warping of ideas has to do with economics - the revisioning of capitalism as deeply Christian (see post bellow for an example). The Acton Institute, The Mises Institute and various neo-conservative Catholic thinkers and authors have set out to recast popular Christian thinking and history about capitalism to baptize it for a new generation.

In essence (and please forgive the generalizing), the new story goes something like this:

The roots of capitalism are not in the Protestant Reformation (and thus the fruit of shrugging off cramped and irrational religious authoritarianism), but the true roots are rather in the much earlier Catholic intellectual current of scholasticism and in the experience of monastic industry and scientific innovation. These early economic thinkers grew out of a Catholic understanding of Creation that was indispensable for the development of science, economics and capitalism. This view of Creation is one that it is ordered according to God's Nature as intrinsically Good. God is Good, so His Creation also is Good and so is reasonable, ordered, intelligible and understandable. These Catholic thinkers are the first to understand and articulate that the economy, like the other intelligible laws of Creation (i.e., gravity and motion), is governed by objective rational laws, and wrote about them. These include the natural right to private property, the price mechanism, the laws of supply and demand, etc.

Understanding that God is the author of Creation and thus the law maker, we understand that we are called to obey His laws, rather than try to rewrite them. We would no sooner try to impose our will on the law of gravity, than we would impose our will on the law prohibiting murder. Our job is to obey God's Laws.

So too, the laws of the economy must be obeyed, and not try to impose our will on them by fiat through various interventions. By observing and obeying the Natural Laws of the economy, we will best be able to promote the common good and lead to the economic flourishing of all.

Therefore, the thinking Catholic should realize that laizze faire economic policies (policies that allow the economy to operated according to its nature, without willful interventions) are just policies according to the Natural Law because they allow economic laws to operate. The just economic policies a Catholic should seek are the elimination of taxes and state regulation (such as antitrust, labor, civil rights, health, environment, etc.), the removal of trade barriers and market protections, and the necessary shrinking of government and government redistribution programs. When we remove these artifically imposed interventions on the economy and allow it to operate freely according to its natural laws, only then will the full extent of human freedom be unleashed in the economy with all the fruits that innovation, entrepreneurship and wealth creation bring to the common good. In short, the good Catholic is the capitalist Catholic who seeks the truely free (libertarian) market place for the good of all.

In response to critics who point out that capitalism tends to promote very anti-christian behavior, the answer is that the market can not operate without Culture and the Catholic's job is to create a very Catholic Culture in which Capitalists operate. Transforming the hearts and minds of men is the job of Christianity, but it is wrong headed to think that we will create a more humane society by rewriting the laws of the economy by imposing artificial regulation upon it. One doesn't solve the problem of lust by making it ok to fornicate, we have to obey the Natural Law of human sexuality as God made it, not as how we would like it. So too we have to obey the Natural Law of economics, and seek to change the hearts and minds of those men and women who work within it.

Obviously this is a simplification, but gets to the point and I hope points the careful reader to the distortion in this effort. The crack in this argument about economics and capitalism comes down to the difference between the laws of nature and the Natural Law.

There is a vast difference between the rational laws that exist in creation and the Natural Law that is written on the human heart. These Catholic neo-conservative apoligists of capitalism would like us to regard the principles of economics in the same vien as the principles of physics - objective and naturally occuring according to God's design. This is why some economists like to think of themselves as scientists studying nature.

However, all economic phenomena is contingent on the actions of men - this is not the case for the physical laws of nature such as gravity, motion, etc. Economics is contingent on human nature - a nature that is fallen and has free will. This is why the Economics Department was traditionally located under the Department of Ethics at Universities - economic activity, like all human activity, has moral dimensions and moral limitations and so must be understood within the feild of ethics.

But this view changed and indeed the current distortion encouraged by many Catholic neo-conservative capitalists is the error of "economism" - the view that removes the human person as a moral being from economic calculus and only looks at the material purposes of human labor.

Just open any economics text book and you will see the false anthropology of the human person that is employed. It is called homo-economicus - the rational material utility maximizer. But this view of the human person is really no different than that employed by Marx and other socialist thinkers.

When you do this you tend to see the laws of economics as naturally occuring and immutable like the law of gravity, rather than seeing this as a sphere of human freedom that men have a duty to circumscribe according to the Natural Law. It is the Natural Law, and not the laws of nature, that govern behavior in human relationship. The laws of nature govern physical objects that do not possess free will nor are morally culpable.

Where there are men, there are sins abounding. The liberals get the credit for advancing most of the planks of the Culture of Death, but the conservatives have their share of credit for doing so in the sphere of economics. Promoting error as good just doesn't fly whether you are talking about stem-cells, euthanasia, homosexuality or indeed capitalism.

You can not baptise a heresy and call it holy.

The New York TimesDecember 15, 2005

The Holy Capitalists
By DAVID BROOKS

What explains success? What forces drive some nations and individuals to move forward and grow rich while others stagnate? These happen to be the most important questions in the social sciences today.

In the scholarly arena, you see an array of academic gladiators wielding big books and offering theories.

Over here are the material determinists. Jared Diamond, with his million-selling "Guns, Germs, and Steel," says the West grew rich not because of any innate superiority, but because Europeans happened to have the right kinds of plants. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, with his tome, "Civilizations," argues that success is determined by climate and geography.

Over there are the cultural determinists. Thomas Sowell argues that ethnic groups develop their own skills and values and thrive or suffer as they compete, conquer and migrate. In his great opus, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations," David Landes shows how cultural mores shaped European empires and the Industrial Revolution.

Now another academic heavyweight has entered the arena. In his new book, "The Victory of Reason," the Baylor sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the West grew rich because it invented capitalism. That's not new. What's unusual is his description of how capitalism developed.
The conventional view, embraced by most of his fellow cultural determinists, is that during the Renaissance and Reformation, Europeans shook off the authority of the Catholic Church. When a secular world was created alongside the sacred one, when intellectual freedom replaced obedience to authority, capitalism and scientific advances were the result.

That theory, Stark says, doesn't fit the facts. In reality, capitalism developed in the Middle Ages, and the important innovations were made by people in the belly of the faith. Religion didn't stifle economic and scientific ideas - it nurtured them.

Stark is building upon the recent research that has reversed earlier prejudices about the so-called Dark Ages. As late as 1983, the esteemed historian Daniel Boorstin could write a chapter on the Middle Ages entitled "The Prison of Christian Dogma."

But the more we learn, the more we realize that most of the progress we link to the Renaissance or later years actually happened during the Middle Ages. Roughly a hundred years before Copernicus, Jean Buridan (circa 1300-1358) wrote that the Earth is an orb rotating on an axis. Buridan, a rector of the University of Paris, was succeeded by Nicole d'Oresme (1323-1382), who explained why the rotation of the Earth doesn't produce wind.

Other medieval Scholastics made the same sort of discoveries in economics and technology. Five hundred years before Adam Smith, St. Albertus Magnus explained the price mechanism as what "goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale."

Catholic monasteries emerged as capitalist enterprises, serving not only as manufacturing and trading centers, but also as investment houses. And engineers invented or commercialized a vast array of technologies: the compass, the clock, the round-bottom boat, wagons with brakes and front axles, water wheels, eyeglasses, and so on.

These innovations and discoveries, Stark argues, were not made by the newly secular, but by people who had a distinctly Christian sense of the sacred. Catholic theology had taught them that God had created the universe according to universal laws that reason could discover. It taught that knowledge and history moves forward progressively, so people should look to the future, not the past.

The church recognized the dignity of free labor at a time when most other cultures did not. It valued private property and emphasized the essential equality of human beings despite their unequal incomes and stations.

This history is important today. (And not only because Albertus Magnus knew more about reconciling faith and reason 700 years ago than the bogus culture warriors do now.) It's important because whether we are dealing with poverty around the world or at home, it is not enough to simply liberate people and assume they will automatically pursue economic prosperity. People need to be instilled with certain beliefs, like the belief that the future can be better than the present and that individuals have the power to shape their own destiny.

Ideas and culture drive civilizations. The Catholic Church nurtured one of the most impressive economic takeoffs in human history. Today, as Catholicism spreads in Africa and China, it's important to understand the beliefs that encourage people to work hard and grow rich.