In Advent, we meditate on the Two Comings of Christ. We meditate first on Christ’s coming in the Incarnation and second on His glorious coming in the General Judgment. We are reminded of the fragile and ephemeral nature of our life in exile on earth. More now that ever, serious Catholics all over the world want to get their families to what “the better life,” that heavenly fatherland. And they are humble enough to know they need the help of other Catholic families and good clergy to arrive there.
Conservatives are now building intentional communities with great foresight and circumspection to protect their families against the overreach of corrupt governments. They realize their children have been poisoned by MMR vaccines, insecticides in food, 5G power-lines overhead, processed seed oils and bad catechesis. Strong Christians (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant) all rightly desire to join like-families who will not call them “conspiracy theorists” for recognizing that one just strong ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP) could knock out the entire grid of a country. Indeed, only those self-sufficient on the land could hope to survive more than a year after a single EMP’s fallout leads to empty supermarkets and violent looting.
Good Catholics know they will need the sacraments in such communities. Unlike England’s 17th century “priest holes,” traditional clergy in future hard times will go where they can take care of the largest amount of people, where there is healthy food and where there is sanity (especially after they have experienced so much gaslighting if they came from a regular diocese.) Already, many clergy are doing underground traditional sacraments because of these recent draconian prohibitions. (No, “underground” does not mean literally underground!) Some upstart Catholic communities are quietly recruiting priests who they will trust more than the average diocesan priest where they are building their homes and chapels together.
Countless urban Catholics are going rural, natural and traditional. I truly love this. But I have a simple warning against it. (No, I’m not one to set up a straw-man argument against intentional Catholic communities and label them all as “communes” or “cults.”) Rather, here is my warning: Do not put pen-to-paper in faith-based covenant-communities. When expectations of faith and morals are written into money-based business contracts, satan usually gets heavily involved.
Religious life is one thing to make vows when men or women pursue celibacy in unattached parallel communities. But whenever dogma and lifestyle become requirements for lay people (who must still live out normal commerce in their community or the world) the temptations for everything from judgment-of-others to adultery become nearly unavoidable in such “official” communities. I can already hear the rebuttal to me: “Well, we will be the first to show that we can live in a faith-based community together since we believe in grace, not our own good intentions.” That’s nice, but so did every failed Christian utopia of the Western Hemisphere in the past 500 years.
My solution to this conundrum is very simple: Continue to go rural. Continue to go traditional. Continue to go natural or organic. But don’t sign convent-community contracts based on common doctrinal beliefs or lifestyle goals. This is a recipe for proximate spiritual attack and ultimate disaster. Utopias (even Catholic ones) seem to fail more rapidly than regular society that has little-to-no resistance against the world and the flesh and the devil. I don’t know why it goes down like this, but it probably has something to do with pride.
I would even say it’s fine to continue to recruit a priest you know in real life (not online) provided you have the ability to release him if you find his chemistry with your community is “off” and/or if such a priest has the need to release himself for service of other similar communities.
In summary, I believe it’s a great idea for big Catholic families to purchase farm land near other Catholic families. One can then begin homesteading near other Catholic families who you consider trustable friends. I even believe it’s fine to have significant prayer time together and do business dealings with each other. (We will all greatly rely on each other if things go even more south in Church or State.) Just don’t put pen-to-paper in conflating business contracts with Catholic lifestyle expectations. Otherwise, you are sitting ducks for even greater spiritual attack. That way, if there’s a fallout between two families, the entire Catholic community in the surrounding area is not devastated.