Reflections on the Past Twenty Years

by Justin Soutar

I wish all readers of this blog post a Happy New Year 2020 and a happy new decade as well. It's hard to believe we've just entered the "Twenties," since my maternal grandparents were born in the 1920s almost one hundred years ago. This milestone is a good time to pause and reflect on the direction of the Church, our country and our world during the first twenty years of the twenty-first century.

From the Jubilee Year 2000 to 2019, the Catholic Church generally prospered under the courageous leadership of three saintly Popes: Saint John Paul II "the Great", Benedict XVI and Francis. Despite major differences in personality, style, and emphasis arising from their different backgrounds and training, there has been a great continuity among the Polish, German, and Argentinian pontiffs in their unwavering focus on Christ and His Gospel; the clarity of their teaching on the essential doctrines of the Faith; and their efforts toward administrative and spiritual reform of the Roman Curia and the Church generally.

While disturbing revelations of sexual abuse of children and youth by some Catholic priests and cover-up by a few bishops in the second half of the twentieth century cast a shadow over the Church throughout the world, these same revelations led to the establishment of new Church policies and structures that contributed to a drastic reduction in abuse incidents in the U.S. during this period. Additionally, during the late 2010s, dissident pressure groups and the secular media ignited an unfortunate controversy within the Church in the U.S. and elsewhere over the meaning and application of certain passages in Pope Francis' beautiful apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), leading millions of faithful Catholics to erroneously believe that Francis wants to change the Church's moral teachings or is unfit for office.

Despite these problems, the Church overall has been thriving. In the U.S., the majority of bishops have been saintly men and nearly all have remained faithful to the Magisterium. We saw the beginning of the end of the chronic priest shortage as orthodox seminaries across America were packed with increasing numbers of holy young men each year and the number of priestly ordinations began to steadily increase. Faithful religious women such as the Nashville Dominicans also grew substantially in number. The number of lay faithful has continued to grow with each Easter Vigil. EWTN expanded its media apostolate by acquiring the National Catholic Register in 2011 and adding tens of millions of new radio listeners and TV viewers. Worldwide, the Church added about 300 million new members during the past twenty years, the majority of them in Africa.

Our country enjoyed an economic boom from 2000 to 2007 during the Bush administration which was followed by the stock market crash of 2008 and resulting Great Recession which was prolonged by the Obama administration's high taxes and increased government regulation of businesses. Lower taxes and less regulation contributed to economic growth and historically low unemployment during the first three years of the Trump administration. While the standard of living generally increased with nearly every American enjoying Internet access, a cell phone and flat screen TV, corporate greed and the failure of wages to keep pace with cost of living increases contributed to the dismemberment of the middle class, and the national debt swelled from $2 trillion to $20 trillion.

The growth of major corporations such as Dollar General, Wal-Mart, Lowe's and The Home Depot forced tens of thousands of small businesses to close by flooding the U.S. market with cheap goods imported from China and other foreign countries. However, a popular movement to support American manufacturers by buying American made products had gained steam by the end of the 2010s, with President Trump replacing NAFTA with USMCA to discourage the outsourcing of American manufacturing. And fueled by growing demand, the organic food and renewable energy industries saw significant growth during the past two decades.

Politically, our country has grown more and more divided from the contested presidential election of 2000 to the futile attempt by House Democrats to impeach President Trump in late 2019. Corrupt Republican and Democratic members of Congress have proven incapable of bipartisan collaboration on a host of pressing issues from abortion and religious freedom to healthcare and the environment to immigration and foreign policy. Unable or unwilling to peaceably discuss and work with their colleagues across the aisle, they've resorted to scoring whatever legislative or judicial victories they can scrape for their own side and either violently attacking or quietly distancing themselves from the opposition. Millions of frustrated Americans espousing traditional Judeo-Christian values created the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party in 2009, many of whose candidates were swept into state and national office in the gubernatorial, senatorial and Congressional elections of 2010 and 2014.

Religiously and morally, our country has become increasingly less Christian under the pervasive influence of militant secularism. Christians are still a large majority of the population, but their percentage has gradually declined while the percentage of nonreligious individuals has grown into double digits and Satanism and the occult have become more popular. In 2000, freedom of religion as protected by the First Amendment was sacrosanct, but just ten years later, under pressure from the abortion cartel and pharmaceutical and insurance giants, the Obama administration was requiring abortion and contraception to be part of "healthcare coverage" regardless of religious or moral objection to these anti-life practices.

During his visit to the U.S. in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI had warned that radical secularism would lead to an attack on religious liberty, and Pope Francis repeatedly highlighted the importance of religious freedom and met briefly with Kim Davis and the Little Sisters of the Poor during his own tour of the U.S. in 2015. The ObamaCare assault on our first freedom provoked a well-organized religious liberty campaign led by our bishops during the 2010s, including an annual Fortnight for Freedom, that led ultimately to the reversal of Obama's HHS mandate and many other anti-religious regulations by the Trump administration.

The confident exuberance and idealistic optimism for world peace, freedom, and prosperity that marked the beginning of the third millennium, nicely encapsulated in the Ford Millennium Anthem "Just Wave Hello," soon proved ill-founded. The shocking destruction of the World Trade Center's iconic Twin Towers by Israeli intelligence agents disguised as Arab terrorists on September 11, 2001 and subsequent terrorist attacks all over the world; the U.S. invasion of Iraq against the urgent advice of Pope John Paul II; the unabated continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the ongoing exodus of Christians from the Holy Land; the U.S. support for ISIS that led to its occupation of the Nineveh Plain in 2014 with subsequent murder and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians and Muslims and the destruction of dozens of ancient churches and monasteries; widespread drug and human trafficking in Central America; civil wars over natural resources in several African countries; brutal Communist repression in China; and North Korea's nuclear weapons tests were just a few symptoms of the pervasive lack of peace and freedom in our twenty-first century world.

Nor was global prosperity so easy to achieve as it seemed, although the spectacular advance of digital technology has led to nearly everyone on earth owning at least one cell phone and the rise of social media has interconnected us as never before. As John Paul II and other twentieth-century Popes predicted in their social encyclicals, transnational capitalism and free trade driven mainly by greed and untethered from moral and ethical considerations have led to the exploitation of cheap labor, economic instability, enormous gaps between rich and poor within the same nation, social unrest, emigration, and environmental degradation. Famine, poverty, and starvation are still common in many countries, and tens of millions of people have left the Third World in search of gainful employment here and in Europe. Benedict XVI's masterful 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) features a penetrating analysis of these problems and beautifully explains why truth and love are essential to a healthy global economy.

Meanwhile, most European countries have largely succumbed to the forces of radical secularism and hedonism, with weekly church attendance in the single digits and their native populations in dramatic decline due to widespread abortion, euthanasia, and the unpopularity of marriage and traditional family life.

Notable changes from historic climate patterns were observed around the world from 2000 to 2019, but the main source of climate change was obscured by thick clouds of "global warming" propaganda and dire warnings of an impending man-made climate emergency. By virtue of its massive size and tremendous energy output, the sun is the dominant influence on earth's weather, beside which all other influences combined, including human CO2 output, are minor. Astronomers have noticed a general decline in solar activity, including a reduced number of sunspots, during this period. And NASA climate satellites have recorded a 3/10 of a degree drop in Earth's average global temperature from 1998 to 2017. Observed changes in solar activity have been the primary cause of climatic changes during the past twenty years.

The truth about the dramatic First World honeybee die-off of the past two decades has been similarly concealed. The blame for Colony Collapse Disorder is usually pinned on a certain class of pesticides, even though their use has declined greatly with the spread of organic farming practices across North America and Europe during this period. The fact is that the proliferation of cell phones and other wireless technology has disrupted normal hive activity, killing honeybees in droves. This is painfully obvious from the fact that honeybees have remained abundant in the ever fewer and shrinking parts of our country and the world where cell phone service is still absent.

To summarize, the overall picture we see here is a mixed bag, with the Church on the whole doing well and our country and our world faring rather poorly. Yet perhaps the most significant negative aspect of the past twenty years is that many of us have been so caught up in the daily newsfeed that we've lost a sense of perspective on the bigger picture, where we've come from and where we're heading, and we're ignoring or forgetting the valuable lessons history has to teach us about our current problems. The Bible says that without a vision, the people perish. In this regard, I heartily recommend Fr. George Rutler's book Calm in Chaos: Catholic Wisdom for Anxious Times.

All of the above mentioned problems in the Church, our country, and the world at large can be traced back to human failure to observe the two great commandments of love of God and love of neighbor. As Pope Benedict said, when we exalt ourselves above God, when we exclude Him as irrelevant, we succumb to the dictatorship of radical secularism. And as Pope Francis said, when we exalt ourselves above our neighbor, we fall prey to the cancer of indifference.

Pundits and interested parties too often exaggerate the gravity of today's problems, forgetting or ignoring the fact that our loving God, who created us, redeems us, sanctifies us, and sustains us in existence at every moment, knows all of our problems and their root causes intimately and is ready to help us resolve them if we humbly turn to Him and request His assistance. When asked what's wrong with the world, G.K. Chesterton famously quipped, "I am!" And Saint Pio of Pietrelcina declared that the solution to all the world's problems is personal holiness. The future of the Church, our country, and our world will be brighter if many of us answer the call to daily conversion, thus radiating the light of faith, hope, and love into the darkness of doubt, despair, and hatred.


Copyright © 2020 Justin D. Soutar.

Epiphany Reflection

Adoration of the Magi, Fra Angelico & Filippo Lippi (15th century)

"Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures in the miracle play; for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional. But the Wise Men must be seeking wisdom; and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is Catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal...It is the realisation of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child."

--G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 (Ignatius Press, 2008, pp. 178-179)

The Tyranny of Radical Secularism (Part 3 of 3)

by Justin Soutar


A Dangerous Cultural Shift

Unfortunately, the United States—a Christian country and the traditional leader of the free world—is now being gradually transformed into a radically secular nation, partly through the increasing moral relativism and religious indifference of its own people, and partly through the aggressive efforts of radically secularist activists in the fields of government and politics, education, and culture. President Barack Obama is the most obvious symbol of this dangerous cultural shift. Prior to becoming president and throughout his years in office, President Obama has consistently exhibited contempt for the Christian faith and its adherents unlike any other president in American history. During his 2008 presidential election campaign, then-Senator Barack Obama derisively referred to Middle Americans as those “who cling to their guns and their Bibles.” He couldn’t have summed up better his contemptuous disregard for our First and Second Amendment rights.

Obama is the first president in U.S. history to invite members of the radically secularist Freedom from Religion Foundation and American Atheists to dinner at the White House. When he went to speak at Georgetown University (a Catholic institution) in 2009, he had the “IHS” symbol behind the podium covered with a cloth. At Christmas of 2009, President Obama considered removing the traditional manger scenes from the White House and offered tree ornaments depicting mass murderer Mao Zedong. When he held a memorial service for the victims of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January of 2011, the service was held in a basketball gym instead of in a church. His administration has effectively gutted faith from faith-based initiatives and turned a blind eye to increasing attacks on religious liberty around the world. Worst of all, President Obama’s healthcare reform law enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act, authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to force most businesses and charitable organizations—including nearly all religious institutions—to provide health insurance plans that cover contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs, even if this violates their moral consciences or religious beliefs, under penalty of heavy fines. In 2012, President Obama publicly declared his support for the legal recognition of homosexual “marriage” alongside traditional marriage. On at least five occasions, when quoting the Declaration of Independence, Obama has said that “we are endowed with certain unalienable rights,” deliberately omitting the phrase “by our Creator.” He has repeatedly failed to mention God in his official Thanksgiving messages. Once he even mocked Congress for reaffirming America’s trust in God through a Congressional resolution, arguing that it was a waste of time. And he has done nothing whatsoever to defend and assist the persecuted Christians of the Middle East, who are now well on the way to extinction.

President Obama’s fanatical secularism is also clearly manifest in his administration’s unprecedented promotion of abortion. Early in 2009, only a massive outcry from the American people prevented Congress from passing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which Obama had promised Planned Parenthood that he would sign; had this bill become law, it would have demolished all state restrictions on abortion, created an unlimited “right to abortion” supported by government entitlement, and forced all physicians to perform abortions. Although FOCA was defeated, a substantial chunk of Obama’s abortion agenda has found its way into ObamaCare and the unconstitutional HHS mandate, both of which have yet to be completely overturned.

No president in history has ever exhibited such utter contempt for the Christian religion and its followers, much less while claiming to be a Christian himself. President Obama has clearly shown himself to be a genuine radical secularist—an enemy of God and religion, an enemy of the American people, and a traitor to our country.

 

The Battle for America’s Future

So where are we at in America today? The answer is that we, the people of the United States, are at war with our radically secularist enemies for the preservation of our traditional national culture and heritage. On the one hand, we have a small but powerful elite group of militant secularists determined to foist their evil agenda on our country through the news and entertainment media, educational institutions, the courts, and the federal government. This agenda includes removing all references to God from official government texts, from our currency, from our public schools, and from public property. It includes government mandated, taxpayer-funded “health insurance coverage” of abortifacients, contraception, and sterilization in violation of the moral law, our religious liberties, and our moral conscience rights. It includes the redefinition of marriage by the courts to place same-sex “marriage” on a legal par with traditional marriage. And it includes the legalization of euthanasia as a basic “human right” to lighten the growing burden of the elderly and the terminally ill on society. Along with this radically secularist agenda being forced on our country from the top down, there is a gradual weakening of Christian faith and culture among the general population; a proliferation of materialistic and hedonistic attitudes along with widespread moral relativism and religious indifference; and growing percentages of nonreligious people and minority faiths and sects such as Islam and the occult.

On the other hand, however, in our nation today there are also many pockets of devout Christian individuals and families who understand and appreciate America’s Christian heritage and who are working hard to restore, preserve, inculcate and hand on the traditional religious and moral values that made our country great. The Catholic Church in America and the more traditional Christian denominations are growing. The massive pro-life movement, which now includes a majority of the American people, is shutting down more abortion clinics and saving more innocent lives each year through prayer and fasting, public outreach, charitable assistance, and political activism. Public opposition to the Obama administration’s anti-life mandate has been vigorous and sustained. Many Americans, aghast at the radical secularists’ push to eliminate God and Christianity from public life, are joining various Catholic and Christian activist organizations such as Fidelis, Patriot Voices, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition to make their voices heard. A large minority of Americans still believe that marriage is exclusively the union of a man and a woman, and more than thirty states have enacted voter-approved laws preserving this traditional legal definition of marriage. And the spectacular Republican landslide victories in the 2014 Congressional and gubernatorial elections were a clear signal of widespread public disapproval with the direction in which President Obama and his secular fundamentalist allies are leading this country.

Secular fundamentalism is continuing to gain ground in America today at least in part due to bad Catholics. Take, for instance, “Catholic” politicians such as Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi who abuse their authority to sanction the mass murder of the innocent unborn and legal same-sex “marriage.” But then there are also the millions of “Catholic” voters who keep putting these radically secularist politicians in office—so-called “Catholics” who for decades have been having abortions, using artificial contraception and sterilization, and getting divorces at rates similar to those of the general public. If it wasn’t for his dissident Catholic allies such as Biden, Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius, former head of the HHS, as well as the millions of Catholics who tolerate legalized abortion and have no problem with birth control, President Obama’s anti-life agenda would never have gotten as far as it has. If American Catholics faithfully practiced their Church’s teachings in both public and private life, we would have a very different country today—a place where militant secularism wouldn’t stand a chance. Benedict XVI put it this way: “There can be no doubt that a more consistent witness on the part of America’s Catholics to their deepest convictions would make a major contribution to the renewal of society as a whole.”[2]

 

The Challenge of Radical Secularism

On January 19, 2012, addressing a group of Catholic bishops from the United States during their ad limina visit to Rome, Pope Benedict XVI made the following remarks about the threat to American culture and society posed by radical secularism:

One of the most memorable aspects of my Pastoral Visit to the United States was the opportunity it afforded me to reflect on America’s historical experience of religious freedom, and specifically the relationship between religion and culture. At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.

For her part, the Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering. To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that would curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality, or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being and ultimate vocation, our relationship to God. When a culture attempts to suppress the dimension of ultimate mystery, and to close the doors to transcendent truth, it inevitably becomes impoverished and falls prey, as the late Pope John Paul II so clearly saw, to reductionist and totalitarian readings of the human person and the nature of society.

The pontiff then issued a prophetic warning:

In the light of these considerations, it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.

On the following day, January 20, 2012, the radical secularism of which the pope had spoken reared its ugly head in our land. Overturning more than two centuries of profound government respect for religious liberties and moral conscience rights in accord with the Constitution and natural law, against the expressed will of the people, and in a direct attack on the Judeo-Christian religious and moral values on which our country is built, the Obama administration announced that nearly all health insurance plans must include abortifacients, artificial contraceptives, and sterilization procedures, regardless of religious or moral objection to these anti-life items. This unprecedented edict, which is still on the books as of this writing despite a slew of court injunctions and exemptions, has nothing to do with the public health and everything to do with the sale of anti-life drugs and procedures for the benefit of large abortion, pharmaceutical, and insurance companies that back the Obama administration. In its disastrous attempt to nationalize our healthcare system, the private interests of a few have trumped concern for the common good, and as a result, the human rights and dignity of tens of millions of innocent Americans have been sacrificed to the false god of money. Corruption and radical secularism frequently go hand in hand.

The fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled both the Affordable Care Act and the HHS mandate constitutional in June of 2012 should serve as a painful warning that the Constitution itself, detached from the religious and moral framework in which it was written and meant to be interpreted, is utterly powerless to protect or guarantee our rights and freedoms. John Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[3] In 1781, in his Notes on that State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson asked: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God?” If our leaders don’t believe that human rights—especially the rights to life and religious liberty—come from our Creator, then those rights will be perceived as coming from the state and the state will claim the authority to give or take them away as it sees fit. And if they don’t believe that it is wrong to legally deprive an innocent person of those rights, then no American’s rights will be guaranteed under the law and the door is wide open to atheistic totalitarian rule.

Benedict XVI identified what is needed to meet the challenge of radical secularism in America:  

Here once more we see the need for an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture and with the courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate about the issues which are determining the future of American society.[4]

For too long now, we American Catholics have cowardly permitted our radically secularist foes to dictate the rules of engagement for the discussion of pressing religious and moral issues, and they are now exploiting our weakness in this regard to strengthen and expand their illegitimate occupation of the public square. We must take back what rightly belongs to us. Specifically, we must articulate a clear defense of the natural moral law written by God in all human hearts, revealed to Israel in the Ten Commandments of the Decalogue, and fully revealed in Jesus Christ and His Church. We must show how this divinely revealed moral compass guided the Founders in charting the course of our nation, and that it is adherence to the law of God that makes us a great nation. We must show how the Ten Commandments, together with the ancient Roman language and law, form the basis of our modern legal system. We must explain how former U.S. laws against abortion, obscenity and pornography were grounded in the objective moral law, and why our nation should enact such laws once again notwithstanding faulty judicial decisions to the contrary. We must demonstrate the universal and unchanging nature of this objective moral law by highlighting its ubiquitous presence in societies and cultures throughout human history. We must show how adherence to the moral law has enabled peoples and nations to flourish and become great (e.g. ancient Rome, medieval Europe, modern America)—and how conversely, abandonment of the moral law has led to the decline and destruction of once-great nations (e.g. ancient Carthage, modern Communist countries).

Freedom to act in accord with the natural moral law is the most basic, the most fundamental of all human rights—even more fundamental than freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, for religion and conscience can both be abused to justify grave violations of the moral law. The HHS mandate and legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” don’t just violate the religious and conscience rights of American believers; even more fundamentally, they violate the natural law and the right of all Americans as human beings to act in accordance with it. By moving beyond a somewhat shallow and subjective “religious liberties and moral conscience rights” approach to a deeper, more profound way of reasoning based on the objective truth of the natural law itself, our logic will resonate not only with fellow American Catholics but also with all people of goodwill in America and beyond, thus enabling us to recruit a broader coalition of allies and mount a more united and effective challenge to the militant secularists within our gates. While defending our specific religious liberties and moral conscience rights as Catholic Americans, we must also defend the timeless freedom of all Americans and all peoples to act in accord with “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

Conclusion

Due to their a priori rejection of absolute religious and moral truth, radical secularists mistakenly view the Christian religion and the Judeo-Christian moral system as purely human inventions rather than as divinely revealed transcendent truths. They offer twenty-first-century America the same temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed in the Garden of Eden at the dawn of human history—the temptation to reject God and decide for ourselves what is good and what is evil. Militant secularists may present themselves as champions of secularism, freedom, tolerance, and pluralism, but history warns us that the implementation of their ideology would crush American secularism, freedom, tolerance, and pluralism under the boots of a dangerous tyranny. Where absolute religious and moral truth is rejected, nothing is left but a “dictatorship of relativism” and a ruthless Darwinian struggle for power. When man cuts himself off from God, he loses his way and becomes a monster. None are more keenly aware of this fact than those who have survived the terror and brutality of radically secularist regimes. “When God is put aside, the world becomes an inhospitable place for man,” remarked Benedict XVI during his visit to Cuba in 2012. "The Russian Church, which has paid in millions of lives for the godless Soviet experiment, can and must testify before the adherents of militant secularism to the fact that a society torn from its spiritual roots and faith has no future," solemnly declared Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a prominent leader of the Russian Orthodox Church who grew up in the Soviet Union, at a religious conference in London in 2014. "A world without God, without absolute moral values rooted in divine revelation, irrevocably turns into the realm of the rule of slavery and lawlessness."[5]

Ultimately, the religious identity of a nation is rooted in the religious character of its individual citizens. Government institutions alone, however well-intentioned and contrived, cannot protect and ensure that identity. As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us in his second encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), “man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew…Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning.” As an “eclipse of God” casts its shadow over our era and mankind finds itself lured once again by the temptation to assert its own self-sufficiency, the United States and the world need Christians—especially Catholics—who have the courage to let the light of Christ shine through them to every corner of society. Clearly, the outcome of the cultural war for America’s future will depend in large measure on the religious and moral character of its people, the vast majority of whom still profess the Christian faith. 

It is a cornerstone of modern evolutionary thought that human societies tend to develop gradually over time from dictatorships into democracies. But in his classic historical work The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton pointed out that the opposite is true:

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East...But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one.[6]

With the ideology of radical secularism being aggressively promoted by an elite few in government, academia, and the media and increasingly accepted in American culture, in the early twenty-first century the United States has begun the process of detaching itself from its Christian roots and sliding gradually into the shadow of totalitarianism. There is hope for the future survival of our country to the extent that we the people—individually and as a nation—place our trust in God and remain vigilant, united in our determination to fight this dangerous ideology until it is defeated. We must pray for the conversion of our radically secularist politicians, professors, media pundits, and cultural leaders. We must confront them in the public square, exposing the errors of their pernicious worldview and working to halt their evil agenda. We must rediscover the Founders’ vision of a secular, free, tolerant, and pluralistic Christian society in which church and state coexist harmoniously. We must unstintingly defend our inalienable human rights given to us by our Creator, especially the rights to life and liberty and the right to act in accord with the natural moral law. We must return to and explicitly reaffirm America’s profoundly Christian identity and her great tradition of religious freedom. And we must re-commit to living by the Judeo-Christian religious and moral principles that made America great. Only then will we once again rightly claim to be “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

 

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.

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ENDNOTES

 

[1] “Benedict XVI's Address to US Bishops on 'Ad Limina' Visit,” ZENIT, January 19, 2012.

[2] Ibid.
[3] Letter to the First Brigade of the Massachusetts Militia, 1798.
[4] “Benedict XVI's Address to US Bishops on 'Ad Limina' Visit,” ZENIT, January 19, 2012.
[5] Address at a conference in London, Feb. 21, 2014.
[6] G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008, pp. 58-59).

 

Quote of the Day

"A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded."

--G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925 (Ignatius Press, 2008, p. 169)

Quote of the Day

If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East...But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one.

--G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008, pp. 58-59)