For $12 Million, at least build a Catholic Church – AmChurch in Las Vegas Diocese

Is it possible that AmChurch is plainly revealing the new theology dreamt of by modernists?

Readers are no doubt aware of the modernists of whom Pope Pius X wrote who, like termites, consume the Church from within, and seek to introduce the new theology.  The new theology, of course, is born of hell.  It is error.  It is worthy of anathema.  It teaches people to live in darkness.

Last week, pictures circulated on the Catholic blogs of a new church, Holy Spirit parish, in the diocese of Las Vegas.  Fr. Z called it the Star Trek church.  Others made similar comments.  I posted an image of the “Blessed Sacrament chapel” containing the white tabernacle on the BF facebook page.  It looks like a Korean-built home appliance.

But I think everyone stopped at the report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  That was fine, as people were able to express their disgust at the design amply well from that.  I had to confirm a theory, though.  I saw one thing that made me suspect that we are seeing the abstract design of a gnostic theology.

Kubrick’s (Clarke’s) Monolith of Transformation

What I saw, when I saw this picture, bothered me.

That black monolith in the middle.

Never-mind the Roddenberry-esque curves the Fr. Z saw.  Put aside for a moment that the tabernacle is not front and center.  After all, we expect that of modern AmChurch presentations of our faith that focus on people in the center.  Nevermind the pillow quilt.  Although, if that were colored in, could those lines not look like fiery flames?

That black chunk taking front and center.  The monolith.  Granted, there is an image hanging in front of it.  That is a step up from a felt banner, at least.

Are you disturbed looking at that picture?  Can’t quite get your finger on it?  It’s black, first of all.  Like a big abyss.

For me, it immediately harkened to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which was based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke).  I will be up front and admit that I was never able to watch the entire movie.  I have watched pieces, and collectively seen it all.  None of the dialog in the movie means anything.  Instead, Kubrick said he wanted the action to convey the meaning of the film.  Instead, the film is a montage of transformation.  Kubrick uses the film screen (a black monolith on its side) to transform the audience.  In the film itself, he shows evolution caused by the monolith.

First, we see the monolith appear to apes.  The apes fondle it and hold it in awe.  In the next scene, an ape murders another ape.

Then, in a scene showing an eclipse, Kubrick gives an image of the monolith having power:

Again, explorers on the moon in the film find a monolith on the Moon.  Space travel, reaching heights, etc…   evolution.  Fast forward through the entire film.  Near the end, the monolith appears in a scene where David is sleeping in a bed about to awake. (get the evolution imagery there?).

The Monolith Makes a Star Child (Transforms a Human to the “Next Level”)

For whatever reason, the image of the new Holy Spirit church immediately sent my mind to this scene.

A star hyperspace scene begins in the monolith and Dave enters and is taken across the cosmos.  He is shown all of history and a bright future.  Dave is transformed into a higher being by the monolith.

Kubrick’s ideas of human evolution were not quite Catholic.  It is the gnostics and to some extent Buddhists that think we can evolove ourselves into deification.  We can’t.  We need God.  He does that.

So, if my theory was true, then there must be more.

De Chardin and the Process Christology Evolution – Omega Point is Kubrick’s Star Child

When we think of process evolution, we should call it first religious humanism.  God is not a person to this process theology, but a force, energy, or some kind of abstract concept of “goodness”.  For De Chardin, he believed all things contained God, that God made the world and put Himself into it, and that was that.  The rest of salvation is us.  (If you notice that the devil and Jesus don’t quite fit in this view, you are right).  Jesus, to de Chardin, was a higher being who showed us the way relationships should work.  And the Holy Spirit is sort of a rehash, a problem for de Chardin.  See, de Chardin believes God is embued in everything.  If that is the case, then we don’t really need a Holy Spirit.  But, de Chardin sees all things evolving (even Jesus – !).

Wrote Fr. Hardon:

In Teilhard [de Chardin]’s thought, all history is a movement toward Christ, whom he calls the Omega Point. In this perspective, Christ, like God Himself, is in a constant evolutionary process—the world is becoming perfected in and through Christ even as Christ is becoming perfected in and through the world.

The critical issue for Chardin is his position on the nature of God. The problem, he says, with people who consider Marxism atheistic is that they define God too narrowly. Certainly if you conceive God as totally transcending the world, then Marxism is godless. But once you realize that God is autologically part of the universe, you see that Marxism is quite theistic and compatible with Christianity.

On these premises, Christ and Christology and the hypostatic union take on a very different meaning than the one taught by the Nicene Creed.

So Christ, to de Chardin, is but a better place of evolution.  More importantly, to de Chardin, Christ is evolving, too.  If you see a problem there, you are right.  Jesus is already perfect.  There’s no evolution happening in God, Who is the same yesterday, today, and forever!  But that is the point of this “new theology”:  man must make themselves better.

The “Omega point” is perfection we reach on our own power?

Julian Huxley, who wrote the Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, is perhaps the outstanding spokesman for this thoroughgoing evolutionism. “Evolutionary biology,” he says, “has given us a new view, impossible of attainment in any earlier age, of our human destiny. That destiny is to be the agent of the evolutionary process on this planet, the instrument for realizing new possibilities for the future.” Modern science, he believes, shows us the picture of a single process of self-transformation. “There has been a creation of new actualities during cosmic time: it has been progressive, and it has been self-creation.”

Get those modifiers.  Self.  Self this, and self that.  The only one who wanted to do things for himself was Satan.

The rest of us need our Savior.  We need Jesus.  Without Him, we can do nothing.

Kubrick’s Space Odyssey Star Child (well, it’s really Arthur C. Clarke’s)

Kubrick uses the monolith to show that a force is guiding David to evolution.  I am not alone to see the parallel to de Chardin’s Omega point here.  In fact, I’ll quote a few authors.

In Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, author Mark Dery sees the likeness immediately.  He is chronicling current trends when he points out that:  “Techno-transcendalist ruminations from the far fringes of physics and artificial intelligence overlap with the millenarian prophecies of New Age visionaries.”  New Age.  No doubt, by now, you realize de Cardin is new agers’ dreams!  If not, I will prove that momentarily.

Dery cites a Terrence McKenna, who made a software package that was picturing his vision of the end of time (Kubrick’s starchild scene).  McKenna believed that 2012 (the Mayan apocalypse in case you forget) would “be exact-with the arrival of an ineffeable mysterium tremendum that he calls ‘the transcendental object at the end of time.’  A cross between the enigmatic monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point.”

I bring that up to show that this stuff is actually dreamt of and being fostered about by people.  Trans-humanism is alive and people think we can do it.

The Lucifer Trust’s (Theosophy’s) “Meditation Room” at the United Nations

I should point out that the black monolith in that church made me think of one of the only other places where I’ve seen wavy lines and a black slab of sorts.  That’s at the United Nations.

The Second General Secretary of the United Nations was a theosophist and student of Alice Bailey’s.  He designed every aspect of the meditation room.  In his own description of it, he says that

But the stone in the middle of the room has more to tell us. We may see it as an altar, empty not because there is no God, not because it is an altar to an unknown god, but because it is dedicated to the God whom man worships under many names and in many forms. 

Whatever else Theosophy is, it is not worshipping our Lord.  In fact, I’ve posted before how it has been shown to be Satanic, and seeking to worship Lucifer.  The new age and theosophy connection and the United Nations is also covered here (wherein the rainbow is discussed).

The point is not so much to get into all the errors of Blavatsky, Russia, and such, but to show the similarity of the concept that a Theosophist has for designing a church.  It has a large black slab in the middle of it.  There is artwork in the back as well.  The shape of the room is a pyramid laying on its side.

In other words, that space is teaching something about some belief other than Catholicism.  Likewise, the space in the new Holy Spirit church is teaching something, but I’m not convinced it is Catholic.

A Parish With No Standing Confession Times

Nobody that reads this blog should be surprised that Holy Spirit parish that is building this church has no standing confession times.  Instead, parishioners are told to call and make an appointment.  The parish is large enough to build a $12 million church for heaven’s sake!  Worse, you are instructed to make the appointment through the administrative staff.  See the sacraments section of their site.

You’d also not be surprised by the pictures of first communion wherein the children are brought around the alter during consecration.  On their website, they have a gallery of images from First Communion.  See the gallery here.

These caught my eye.  Notice the GIANT pita loaf. This is their own report of First Communion there this year.

So, it’s safe to say that this is AmChurch.  And this is what AmChurch builds when it has cash.

Check out the baptismal font:

That will be placed in the back of the church, down the main aisle.  It looks like the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey!

That looks like the hyperspace version of this:

Stations of the Holy Spirit?

I’ve never heard of such a thing, but the church will have them.  These “Stations of the Holy Spirit” are commissioned to be painted by John Nava.  Nava is the same painter that did the tapestries for the Cathedral in Los Angeles.

Images of these “stations of the holy spirit” were reported in the Review-Journal:

Is anyone else disturbed by the representation of Mary?  Besides her head being uncovered, Mary is the spouse of the Holy Spirit, so the tongue of flame is not typically shown on her head at Pentecost.

I notice something else, though.  Heads down and eyes closed.  They look buddhist.  Saints in the Catholic tradition are shown with eyes open and aware!

I also notice that they are in the black — as if they are in the abyss of that monolith.

I don’t think there’s a smoking gun of much there, except for this idea:  the apostles don’t look like the apostles.  And this one, titled, “the Holy Spirit is the Wisdom of God.”

Sorry, but the ethereal feel of it, and the abstractions make me think of the abstract in the UN Meditation Room.  Whatever else this stuff is, it does not convey concepts that strike me as Catholic or in line with tradition.

Which is Worse: AmChurch with Pictures or Whitewashed?

This is AmChurch’s response to whitewashed churches…   Like the Los Angeles cathedral (aka the Roj Mahal), it is a large expense.  The Review-Journal says it is a $12 million dollar build.

Don’t get me wrong…  I’m happy that a large church is being built.  I just wish it was Catholic.

This article, For $12 Million, at least build a Catholic Church – AmChurch in Las Vegas Diocese is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/twelve-million-amchurch-built-las-vegas-diocese/
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