"The crisis is already spreading to our part of the world."
"The crisis is already spreading to our part of the world."
Today I’ll do something I rarely do: turn over my column to what I think is an essential commentary—in this case, from the influential Fil-Am conservative writer Richard Fernandez. The crisis he talks about predominates in the West, but with globalization and the Internet, it’s already spreading to our part of the world.
Two days after Easter Sunday, it’s good to be reminded of the Apostles’ missionary tasking (the third “glorious mystery” in the Rosary) and the form that that tasking now takes for today’s Christians.
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In an April 2019 letter, Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote an article describing how the Church lost the ability to govern itself and found many of its formation centers turned into hatcheries for sexual abusers.
It was a two-step process. First, the popes lost the culture war within the Church. "In the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the previously normative standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely." Efforts to reverse the trend were dismissed as conservative claptrap.
Pope John Paul II, who knew very well the situation of moral theology and followed it closely, commissioned an encyclical that would set these things right again … Veritatis splendor on August 6, 1993, and it triggered vehement backlashes on the part of moral theologians.
[Benedict]: “I shall never forget how then-leading German moral theologian Franz Böckle … announced … that if the encyclical should determine that there were actions which were always and under all circumstances to be classified as evil, he would challenge it with all the resources at his disposal …
“There were … individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern “Catholicity” … In not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood.”
Then the popes found that, having lost the culture wars, the victorious memes started flying their flags from the seminaries. Benedict recalls that "in various seminaries homosexual cliques were established," which brought not just new sexual mores but a deliberate new form of transgressive behavior. To Benedict, it seemed as if his Church was under deliberate attack:
“The devil wants to prove that there are no righteous people; that all righteousness of people is only displayed on the outside. … Look at what this God has done. Supposedly a good creation, but in reality full of misery and disgust. That disparagement of creation is really a disparagement of God. It wants to prove that God Himself is not good, and thus to turn us away from Him.”
Benedict's recollections might be of little interest to non-Catholics did they not so closely mirror the recent experience of the secular West. As the devil was taking over the seminaries, something was also seizing the great universities of Europe and America, turning them into bastions of political correctness. Everything that happened inside the Church also happened outside with astounding swiftness.
In less than 20 years, marriage was redefined from its centuries-old meaning as a union between a man and woman to include homosexuals. Abortion became a progressive sacrament. Concepts of gender and race, which some had thought to be immutable, were transformed in a few short years into a veritable smorgasbord of categories. Slate tells us Facebook offers users 56 genders to choose from.
How long before the fate of Benedict's Church is the fate of the West? Almost overnight, concepts like patriotism, family, national borders and even masculinity have become bad words. If the years since 2016 prove anything, it is that the crisis in Western culture is as extensive as that gripping the Catholic Church.
Is there a way out? The Roman empire never solved the problem of how to dominate a malignant meme, but humanity found a way of outlasting it.
"Western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock [seven] miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea." The mission of the monks was to remember God—to remember the truth—until the mysterious workings of the system brought them forth again.
Benedict's strategy is not to rely primarily on political measures but on millions of "Skellig Michaels" scattered through the human landscape. It is from these martyrs (as he calls them) and not primarily the Church hierarchy that hope and innocence will be renewed.
"Today God also has His witnesses (martyrs) in the world. We just have to be vigilant in order to see and hear them. … The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God, through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped."
It may be enough to keep playing the game this side of the Last Judgment. Human survival from the beginning depended on the little flame of hope that keeps us living, having children, and showing up for tomorrow. The despair that is currently challenging our civilization knows it is unnecessary to douse the nuclear fires, but only that tiny flame, certain that there will be no Easter if we give up on Good Friday.
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On this Tuesday of the Octave of Easter, the Gospel reading (John 20: 11-18) talks of Mary Magdalene, a prosperous woman from the fishing village of Magdala, who began following Jesus’ ministry around the Sea of Galilee after He cast demons out of her.
At the point of His death, she was among the small group of women who stood at the foot of the Cross. And at the moment of His resurrection three days later, she was the first person to discover the empty tomb, witness and talk to the risen Jesus, and announce the good news to the rest of His followers.
Over the centuries, the Magdalene has been popularly mistaken for Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha of Bethany, as well as a variety of “fallen women”. But in 1969 the Church cleared her name, and in 2016 Pope Francis elevated her memorial date, June 22, to the status of a feast day.
No longer the maligned camp follower, Mary Magdalene is now honored as “the Apostle to the Apostles”, the first witness and proclaimer of His resurrection—this woman “who so loved Christ and was so greatly loved by Him”. Across the centuries, she speaks to us of the dignity of women, the power of women’s witness, as well as the way we should value them as sisters in Christ: with love, with respect, and—from us men—with our fidelity and fealty.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.
