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From the archives:

IN CURRENT CRISIS IS DEEP DARK MYSTERY OF OIL 

Summer 2010

There is something dark and mysterious and unsettling about oil and perhaps we need to look at its fruits. We'll get to that in a moment. First, it now appears that Louisiana and the Gulf will bear the brunt of another Katrina-like event.

Instead of wind and rain is now black sludge. Let us pray to prevent it.

Intriguing it is that the famous hurricanes -- not just 'Katrina,' but also 'Rita' -- seemed almost to target patches of oil rigs. During those storms, more oil was spilled than has thus far occurred with the current oil-rig disaster -- a disaster that truly warrants our urgent appeal to Our Lady of Prompt Succor [see below].

Was the Lord indicating something to us back then?

Is He saying something about the morality along the coast, or about oil and modern contaminating "technology" in general: is it a message meant for the rest of the nation?

Is there significance in this coming right after other deep stuff poured from a volcano?

Let's get to the mysteries: astoundingly, scientists still cannot definitely prove how oil is formed -- from whence it originates. Most believe it is a "fossil fuel" derived from decayed vegetation and animals from the long-gone past -- organisms that fell to the bottom of the oceans and piled on top of each other, turning to a waxy compound called kerogen (which, left alone, breaks apart into either petroleum or natural gas).

But as it turns out, that "fact" remains only a theory. As far back as the 1950s, Russian scientists began to question it and proposed instead that petroleum might have formed deep inside the earth -- the so-called "abiogenic" theory. Might oil even be a substance that layers of the planet need for movements we don't understand (because we can't see down there)? Could it have formed deep down there inorganically.

Also fascinating is how others -- skeptical that so much vegetative and animal debris could pile up to form oil -- postulate that if indeed decayed organic matter formed petroleum, it must have occurred during a Flood-like global event.

Admittedly, that's a very minority viewpoint; it's based on the existence worldwide of "porphyrins" -- organic molecules similar to what is found in plants and animal blood but believed by these theorists to form only in rare environmental circumstances. "But such environments are too rare to explain the presence of porphyrins in all the many petroleum deposits found around the world," claims Dr. Andrew Snelling, who holds a doctorate in geology from the University of Sydney and is involved in creationist research.

"All available evidence points to a recent catastrophic origin for the world's vast oil deposits, from plant and other organic debris, consistent with the biblical view of earth history. Vast forests grew on land and water surfaces in the pre-Flood world, and the oceans teemed with diatoms and other tiny organisms. Then during the global Flood cataclysm, the forests were uprooted and swept away. Huge masses of plant debris were rapidly buried in what thus became coal beds, and organic matter generally was dispersed throughout the many catastrophically deposited sedimentary rock layers."

We don't know about that. Perhaps more interesting: the notion that oil has always been or at least for a long while a constituent of the deep earth, perhaps even from the core. At the least, it tugs at the imagination.

It also causes us to reflect on the prophecy of a mystical Serbian priest named Zaharije Zaharich (1836-1918), who as we have previously noted once predicted that "people will drill wells deep in the ground and dig out gold, which will give them light, speed, and power, and the earth will shed tears of sorrow, because there will be much more gold and light on its surface than in its interior. The earth will suffer because of these open wounds. Instead of working in the fields, people will dig everywhere, in right and wrong places, but the real power will be all around them, not being able to tell them, 'Come on, take me, don't you see that I am here, all around you.'

"Only after many a summer, people will remember this real power, and then they will realize how unintelligent it was to dig all those holes. This power will also be present in people but it will take a long time before they discover it and use it. Thus man will live for a long, long time, not being able to know himself. There will be many learned men who will think through their books that they know and can do everything. They will be the great obstacle for this realization [self-knowledge], but once men get this knowledge, then people will see what kind of delusion it was when they listened to their learned men. When that happens, people will be so sorry that they didn't discover it before, because this knowledge is so simple."

We must say: that Gulf oil well certainly seems like an open wound. It also seemed in the wrong place.

The fruits of oil: they allow for many modern conveniences at a relatively cheap price (which seems to be the overriding determinant of everything in the current societies of men), and even clothing and pharmaceutical products. On the negative end, they have led to a wild proliferation of cars and petrochemical pollution: there is no longer any American stream from which totally uncontaminated fish can be found. Chemicals are found in the Arctic as well as the deepest ocean. Many years, Louisiana -- which has among the most concentrated petrochemical facilities -- has led the nation in cancer. At one university in New Orleans, coeds complained that the air caused their nylons to begin dissolving on especially smoggy days. Meanwhile, the seafood has often been tainted -- if not with chemicals, with high levels of e coli.

All across the Gulf, and for that matter the world, overfishing is a huge problem.

And so now the poor people of Louisiana (which along with Texas probably has about the strongest contingent of devout Marian Catholics) suffer as victim souls -- perhaps soon to be joined by other states. Despite their efforts, many in places like the French Quarter (where restaurants are all but solely reliant on seafood) failed to shed their evil after 'Katrina" (a name that means purification.)

There were defiant gay festivals. There remained voodoo (as in Haiti; as in "quake"). The Mardis Gras continued to allow raucous blasphemies. In Mississippi, they earnestly went about replacing ruined casinos.

And now, as a century ago in Galveston (following a particularly demonic Mardi Gras, and after the famous mud-churning hurricane) there is the prospect of black sludge.

It is something to ponder at this time when we have clearly abused the earth for short-term gains.

"I've been in Pensacola and I am very, very concerned about this filth in the Gulf of Mexico," Florida Governor Charlie Crist said at a fundraiser for his U.S. Senate campaign Sunday night. "It's not a spill, it's a flow. Envision sort of an underground volcano of oil and it keeps spewing over 200,000 gallons every single day, if not more."

And so we pray: