France as a social laboratory
The French Revolution is one of the many examples of how France, perhaps due to its geographic location, has been and continues to be the test tube of social ideologies which then influence the rest of Europe and eventually the rest of the Western world.
Would it be for this very reason that the same country that blocked the Islamic advancement into Europe, at Poitiers in 732 A.D., is now suffering from a new type of attack and invasion? In the matter of a very short time, France was twice the victim of Islamic terrorism: in January 2015, against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and again in November of that same year throughout Paris, just outside of a sports stadium, in the city restaurants and bars and in the Bataclan theatre where a rock concert was underway.
With a view towards greater integration policies among member countries of the European Union, the former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing drafted the Constitution of the European Union. Approved by the Commission, it was destined to pass in all the parliaments of Europe had it not been defeated in a French referendum. After this defeat, Europe was never able to recover from the blow; today it is experiencing a profound identity crisis and a progressive disintegration.
For some time now this country has been the victim of a voracious, insolent, obscene and militant secularism, inspirer of the grotesque caricatures of the magazine Charlie Hebdo against Islamic and Christian faith, but never against the faith in atheism. Since the caricatures of Islam are well known because they triggered the notorious attack on the magazine, I point out two particularly shocking and blasphemous ones against the Christian faith: The Holy Trinity in a sexual “ménage à trois”, and Pope Francis being sodomized by a transvestite.
Despite the secularism and militant nihilism against religion, France is still a Catholic country as 63% of its population declare themselves as such. Once known as the “beloved daughter of the Church”, where is today the France that defended Christianity so well, and gave the Church and the world so many notable saints and theologians? Now downcast, it has lost its former glory and assertiveness, and in fear and shame allows itself to be vexed by unprincipled people, as if ashamed to be Christian.
Having been the country that stopped the advance of Muslims in the past, today it is the country in Europe with the most Muslims, making up 7.5% of its population, followed by Germany with 5.8%, England with 4.8%, Spain with 2.1%, and Portugal with 0.3%.
Can history repeat itself?
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. – George Bernard Shaw
History is made not only of evolution and progress, but also of involution and regression. Since the time of Egypt of the pharaohs, to Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece, up to the time of Rome, each country, each empire made its contribution to the Western civilization which has been progressively developing economically, politically and culturally, until it reached its height in Greece and Rome.
From Egypt, we inherited medicine, astrology, and the origins of the written alphabet; from Mesopotamia-Babylonia, the first code of law -- the Hammurabi Code -- and agricultural techniques; from Israel, monotheism as the religious worldview and the Bible as the source of ethics; from Greece, philosophy, science, and democracy as a form of government; and from Rome, the Republic, the organization of the State, the law, the roads and the bridges.
It seems unfathomable that a superior culture in all aspects including military power could have succumbed to a bunch of uncultured barbarians coming from the North and East of Europe who plunged the continent into centuries of darkness. What caused the downfall of the Roman Empire? How could a superior culture be defeated and fall prey to a much inferior one?
As the renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee cited above, civilizations die from suicide not by murder. The barbarians only struck the final nail in the coffin; they only delivered the decisive deathblow to a civilization that had been dying for a long time. The Roman Empire ended by implosion. It fell on its own sword - it took its own life.
Rome was not built in a day nor did it collapse in a night. It was a gradual process that started with the moral degradation and decline of the civic values that had built the empire in the first place. It was the breakdown of the ideals, and the moral and ethical values which motivated and guided the day to day lives of the people. When these values disappeared, the lives of the people changed and with it, the society. Therefore, the morals, the ideals and the values which gave meaning to life in the Empire collapsed long before the Empire disintegrated politically, economically and militarily.
You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matthew. 6:24) – In the context of the Roman decline, God symbolizes the spiritual and authentically human values while money represents the temporal ones. Moral and human decline, as always, begins with the accumulation of wealth that makes possible a life of pleasure and luxury, thus creating the dissolute living of the ruling class.
From the ruling class, corruption spread like a wild fire to all levels of the Roman society. The lust for power led to political instability; the constant wars of succession forced the legions to abandon the defense of the borders to restore order and discipline inside of Rome. Furthermore, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor turned the Empire into a giant with feet of clay, a vulnerability that the barbarians were able to exploit.
Many factors which contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire, after 500 years of absolute dominance over the West, are now in progress in the Western world, making it even possible that history could repeat itself and that the adversaries, this time the Muslims, could cause the West to plunge into a second Middle or Dark Ages, as the American historians like to call it.
There were much fewer atrocities under the Caesaro-Papism (union of Church and State) rule of the Middle Ages than there are presently in the Sharia ruled countries. Some examples of their well-known atrocities are the bombings by the Afghanistan Taliban of the centuries-old statues of Buddha carved in rocks, the stoning of women caught in adultery in most Muslim countries, the cutting off of hands of those who steal, even if they were children, the dream of Erdogan, the President of Turkey, to restore the Ottoman Empire, the duplicity of Saudi Arabia as friend of the West while funding terrorism or any form of Islamic militancy, the dream of Iran to wipe Israel off the map and to possess atomic bomb, the atrocities of the Islamic State in beheading any opponents of Islam, even children for simply having missed prayer on Fridays…
The dysfunctionality of the family
As the germ cell of the family’s social fabric, family values are always the cornerstone of an ascending culture. This was true of the society in ancient Rome during its time of expansion and in the West just after World War II to the seventies. The real human and spiritual values thrive better in a frugal society than in one of abundance. In fact, it was noted that the increase in material excess that the consumer society brought to the West was proportional to the decrease in the living out the spiritual and human values. Furthermore, as it was also seen in the Roman society, gradually with each new generation the family unit began to fragment and weaken.
As in ancient Rome, starting with the decline of moral values, husbands and wives gave in to the compulsions of human nature and adultery became rampant. The number of failed marriages and dysfunctional families increased and divorce became the easiest solution to any types of marital conflict. Nowadays the divorce rate in the United States is at 53%, France at 55%, Spain at 61% and Portugal at 70%.
Unstructured and dysfunctional families resulted in more and more children and teenagers being institutionalized as the State has been forced to remove them from their negligent parents. In ancient Rome, the education of children and young people was carefully and painstakingly assimilated to instill the values of patriotism, the formation of character, the control of emotion, and the importance of obedience and respect for the laws. The same was true in the West up until the eighties.
Nowadays schools do not officially teach values; the only place where these were taught was in the subject called Religious and Moral Education, which has been eliminated from most schools. The few that still offer it to their students have downgraded its importance by slotting it at the end of an afternoon of spares, thus forcing even the most ardent students to give up.
A misguided concept and an inadequate application of “democracy” in the area of education have lured many parents into giving up their position of “authority” as educators for a position of equals with their kids thus pretending to be just their friends. This being so they have neglected to form and inform, and teach and discipline their children; instead, they are giving their kids more freedom than they are able to manage responsibly. The end result is that they grow up like little bourgeois with an easy and paved life that has made them weak, lazy, unprepared for life, irreverent, disobedient and living in a world of fantasy where they have only rights not duties, where they only consume without contributing.
With the loss of family values, the solidarity between generations is also lost. The proof of this is the growing isolation and loneliness in which many of our seniors live. Who does not remember the heat wave of August 2003 where in Paris alone 14,000 seniors died in their apartments. Many of the bodies were left unclaimed and therefore their funerals were paid by the State. Not even dogs die in this way in this day and age… ironically, in Portugal it is a crime to abandon a pet, but it is not a crime to abandon an elderly.
Negative birthrate
Recently on television a condom commercial showed a father shopping with his son inside a supermarket; on passing a shelf of potato chips the son grabs a bag and puts it in the shopping cart, the dad however takes the bag and puts it back on the shelf; the son defiantly grabs the bag again and puts it back inside the cart, the dad again removes it; after three times the child becomes hysterical and begins to kick the cart and the shelves until all the items fall to the ground. In the face of the expressionless father and adult onlookers watching the child screaming and getting completely out of control we hear the commercial message, “if you had used this condom (brand)… this would not have happened…
Any reasonable person watching this scene would conclude that the child is poorly disciplined; but the commercial wants the viewers to conclude that children are the result of failure of other brands of condom. The growing individualism and egocentrism in the West have influenced the birth rates; some married couples even contemplate the possibility of only getting pets in place of having children. Many of these pets are treated like family members, establishing with them the bonds appropriate with human beings; large fortunes are even spent on the welfare of these animals.
I recall the incident of a cat that was connected to a machine to keep it alive artificially. When the veterinarian recommended turning the machine off because its vital organs were no longer functioning, he was labelled cruel by the cat owner’s family.
The irrationality of abortion
Despite the population getting older and without enough offspring to replace the present generation, the West continues to legalize and perform abortion as a method of contraception. On this and other matters like the case of Galileo Galilei, the Church has been unjustly and wrongfully accused and stigmatised as being pre-scientific. In the case of Galileo, the reality is that he failed to provide credible evidence that could prove his theory; he was just not able to do so because it was scientifically impossible given what was available at the time. Similar situations occurred in regards to Einstein’s theory of relativity which only now can it be proven to some extent.
The truth of the matter is that the Church far from being opposed to has always been on the side of science, and some of her members are well-known leaders in their field of expertise; for example, the Belgium priest Georges Lemaitre developed the Big Bang theory, the monk Gregor Mendel is known as the Father of Genetics…
In the case of abortion, it is the society that places itself against science, because it is scientifically indisputable that human life begins at conception, that is, when the sperm, which is half of the human cell, unites irreversibly with the egg, the other half, approximately one hour after the conjugal act, forming a new human cell with an indivisible and unchangeable genetic code that is unique in the entire history of life on this planet.
Once formed, the fertilized egg, the new being that is self-programmed, only needs to be left alone in the womb for nine months. To justify abortion some groups seek to redefine the beginning of human life at any other time after conception, doing so non-objectively in order to defend their ideology; outside the time frame of conception, any other time to which we allocate the beginning of human life will never ever be scientific, but rather arbitrary and at the service of an ideology.
While this is taking place in the West, Erdogan the President of Turkey whose dream as we have said before is the restoration of the Ottoman Empire, declares himself against family planning, birth limitation and gender equality saying that these are principles of Western ideology and are not applicable to the Muslim world; according to him, no one should interfere with the plans of Allah; the duty of a woman is to be a mother, the more children she has the better.
The function of prophecy
So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Jonah 3:3-4
In the Bible a prophecy was never intended to be a prediction, but rather a reprimand or a warning: “If you continue to live in this or that way disaster will occur….” The people of Nineveh as we know converted after hearing the prophecy and what the prophet Jonah announced that was to come did not happen. The same can happen to the Western Civilization, by way of a revolution or evolution it can change its present course thus avoiding the decline towards which it is heading.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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