“Daily the world is oppressed by new and growing evils.” Thus spake Gregory the Great, in the 6th century. “Daily the world is oppressed by new and growing evils.” A thousand years later, in the 16th c., Luther said, “There has never been greater error, sin, and falsehood on earth from the beginning as there has been in the last century.”

It feels like our day is different. The transgender craze seems a unique rebellion against nature itself. But each age has its madness, as we spin closer to the day of judgment. Luther saw the immorality of the clergy as a harbinger of the end: “Unchastity has taken forms against nature and has drowned no estate as much as the spiritual estate” - the spiritual estate meaning the clergy and monastics. The depravity of our day may be uniquely celebrated by government and corporations, but the rebellion against the Creator is not new. The historic Lutheran complaints about abuses testify that the deep perversions inside the Roman Catholic monasteries and seminaries were already scandalous five hundred years ago….