The Gospel of this Second Day of Easter, Easter Monday, is Matthew 28:8-15 which records the encounter of the women with the risen Christ and their testimony to the Apostles, and the testimony of the soldiers who had witnessed the events of the Resurrection and reported it to the Jewish leaders. The Jewish leaders and the elders called a meeting and conspired to spread that lie blaspheming Christ and maligning the disciples of Christ. They paid the soldiers hush money with the order to spread that myth. The Gospel says that "this story has circulated among the Jews to the present day."
This anti-Christian Jewish myth calls to mind two modern lies of our present day, which are offshoots of that original big lie by the murderers of Christ and a direct fulfillment of today's Gospel: 1) the Enlightenment secular humanist cynicism which calls religion "
the opium of the people," that all religion is simply an invention of men in power to manipulate and oppress people (popularized by the influence of Karl Marx, himself a Jew) and 2) The Black Legend which demonizes all things Catholic.
Those modern myths are part of the essence of a sort of anti-Catholic/anti-Christian/anti-God religion which is propagated, with supreme intolerance, in all of the public institutions of learning throughout the modern world and is effectively converting millions of souls in every generation to its anti-resurrection cause, the cause of Satan against Christ. Their great lie, which amounts to blasphemy and calumny, is that Jesus Christ and His followers should be liars and deceivers.*
Here is the passage.
"...[B]ehold, some of the guard [of the tomb] came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. And when they had assembled with the elders and had consulted together, they gave much money to the soldiers, telling them, "Say, 'His disciples came by night and stole him while we were sleeping.' And if the procurator hears of this, we will persuade him and keep you out of trouble." And they took the money, and did as they were instructed; and this story has been spread abroad among the Jews even to the present day."
Matthew 28:8-15
This Jewish anti-Christian conspiracy also calls to mind another related fact. In our own day any Jew who converts to Christianity is expelled from the Jewish community. He is officially no longer considered a Jew by the Jewish people themselves, his own race and family will deny the fact that he is racially an ethnic Jew. He is totally cut off from his own people. There is a total rejection of Christ, the Messiah, the King of the Jews, and any of his disciples, to this day.
But "Scripture says, 'Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, chosen, precious; And he who believes in it shall not be put to shame.' For you, therefore, who believe is this honor; but to those who do not believe, "A stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner,' and 'A stumbling-stone, and a rock of scandal,' to those who stumble at the word, and who do not believe. For this also they are destined."
1 Peter 2:6-9
And Peter, the first Pope calls on all men, beginning with the Jews, to lay aside lies and to embrace Jesus Christ, the Truth, the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through Him.
"Lay aside therefore all malice, and all deceit, and pretense, and envy, and all slander. Crave, as newborn babes, pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow to salvation; if, indeed, you have tasted that the Lord is sweet. Draw near to him, a living stone, rejected indeed by men but chosen and honored by God. Be you yourselves as living stones, built thereon into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ."
1 Peter 2:1-5
*As an example of the anti-Catholic bigotry of higher education consider the fate of
the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. It was considered intolerable that college students were converting to Catholicism in droves. But, "It is noteworthy that when students lose their faith while in college (years ago, the chaplain of the Newman club at Hunter College confided to me that 65 percent of Catholics lose their faith by their senior year), on one objects or even bats an eyelid. After all, the world tells us, colleges should open the minds of their students, and help them to get rid of their childish prejudices. Had students joined an oriental sect, become Buddhists or adepts or new Age, the news media would have remained silent. Had many of them shifted from one Protestant sect to another, it would not have been worth mentioning. But to become Roman Catholic, to enter into this dark fortress that robs people of their freedom and plunges them into a world of darkness and medieval ignorance: this was scandalous. Such people must be 'saved' from intellectual slavery. The work of the three professors--whose crime was to believe in the objectivity of truth and the universal validity of moral values--was destroyed." Father Francis Bethel,
John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, Merrimack, New Hampshire: Thomas More College Press, 2016, xvii-xviii.
Another example would be the current massive conversions of people to Islam in the United States penitentiary systems. No one seems to mind as millions of people are indoctrinated and converted and taught to deny that Jesus Christ is God.