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Post-modernity responds: People scribble their responses to the latest existential acts of terror.
Before reading further, we invite readers to pray a ''Hail Mary'' for the victims of the attacks in Brussels.
On 16th November last year, we critiqued the fact that, in the wake of the dreadful attacks in Paris, so many people were deriving ''great comfort, hope and peace'' from a pianist playing John Lennon's nihilistic anthem Imagine, outside of the doomed Bataclan theatre.
At the time we lamented the fact that this episode, taken together with the playing of jazz-music, the relativistic and uncertain responses of so many Catholic prelates who failed to even mention Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the pointless violence itself, were emblematic of the fact that our civilization is circling the drain.
And now, in the middle of Holy Week 2016, Europe bleeds once again. How much more decadent those rupture-inducing words of Cardinal Walter Kasper at the weekend now appear.
It is becoming almost a custom now to light up famous landmarks in the colours of the flag of the latest victims, to declare oneself ''Je suis'' this or that, to post up heartfelt messages and hold up handwritten phrases on social media, and to basically proclaim that, although the terrorists have guns and bombs, we have flowers.
As the above-picture shows, people in Brussels had already taken to chalking messages like ''My religion is peace!'' on the pavement of the Place de la Bourse yesterday.
Rome burns and the masses fiddle...
Lessons from History
About 9 years ago, I got into reading the works of both G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Although overlooked in contemporary society, these writers have proved as prescient as they were entertaining to read.
The late and great Fr. John Feeley, who died a few years ago at the age of 95, used to offer the Traditional Latin Mass, each Sunday afternoon, in his parish of Our Lady of Victories and St. Alphonsus in Lutterworth. We remember him preaching on the fact that Chesterton and Belloc had been prophetic on so many themes. He pointed out that, although he first read them as a boy of 15 in Lancashire, he had never forgotten their warnings about the coming of a society marked by unnatural crimes.
Another theme which the great ''ChesterBelloc'' got so right related to the fact that Europe owes its historical development to the Catholic Church.
The sincere student of history is forced to acknowledge that this assertion holds true in the inter-related fields of religion, philosophy, family-life, civic-life, healthcare, law, prayer, social cohesion, trade, art, architecture, culture, music and military organization.
In common with such careful historians as Christopher Dawson, these wise men recognized that the survival of Western civilization depended on the recovery of the Catholic Faith at its foundation and heart.
Belloc was so far ahead of his time that he penned an article in 1929, fully 87 years ago, which was scoffed at by many as being quite preposterous. He wrote:
Survivals and New Arrivals (1929)
There remains, apart from the old Paganism of Asia and Africa, another indirect supporter of Neo-Paganism: a supporter which indeed hates all Paganism, but hates the Catholic Church much more: a factor of whose increasing importance the masses of Europe are not as yet aware: I mean the Mahommmedan religion: Islam.
For centuries the struggle between Islam and the Catholic Church continued. It had varying fortunes, but for something like a thousand years the issue still remained doubtful. It was not till nearly the year 1700 (the great conquests of Islam having begun long before 700) that Christian culture seemed - for a time - to be definitely the master.
During the 18th and 19th Centuries the Mohammedan world fell under a kind of palsy. It could not catch up with our rapidly advancing physical science. Its shipping and armament and all means of communication and administration went backwards while ours advanced. At last, by the end of the 19th Century, more than nine-tenths of the Mahommedan population of the world, from India and the Pacific to the Atlantic, had fallen under the Government of nominally Christian nations, especially of England and France.
On this account our generation came to think of Islam as something naturally subject to ourselves. We no longer regarded it as a rival to our culture, we thought of its religion as a sort of fossilized thing about which we need not trouble.
That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise.
Lessons which need to be re-learned - and quickly!
What can be more emblematic of a culture that has lost faith not only in God and Catholic Truth but in its very self, than the spectacle of post-moderns burying their heads in the sand, so to speak, by playing with lights on buildings even as radical Islam rises up to destroy their civilizaton. Indeed, even as churches are desecrated, transport hubs are blown to pieces and women are raped and molested in increasing numbers, by elements within the surging numbers of immigrants fleeing from the destabilized countries of the Middle-East.Â
And, whilst some adults chalk feel-good slogans on sidewalks, disturbing numbers of young people respond by instead signing up for radical right-wing vigilante groups to respond to so-called Islamic no-go areas in the disintegrating cities of Europe.
Of course, neither of these extremes is the correct response. When you have taken a wrong turn somewhere in a journey, you need to retrace your steps to the point when you knew where you were.
Europe once knew that it was Catholic. She understood that her culture was underpinned and had taken shape through the fertile roots of Catholic Christendom. Even the concept of individual rights and liberties, though perverted through freemasonic and Enlightenment influences, would not have taken shape, as it did, without the foundational environment of Catholic Christendom and her Scripture-based thought forms.
Before yesterday's evil atrocities in Brussels, there were a couple of news items from the last week or so that had caught our eyes. Both were hugely symbolic of where we are at culturally speaking.
The first related to the darkening of Europe in honour of the globalists' Earth Hour. Although the Vatican authorities symbolically plunged St. Peter's Basilica into darkness, towns in Sweden would not extinguish their lights, for fear of public safety in light of the numerous attacks on women carried out by elements within the large numbers of immigrants.
The other news related to the deeply troubling fact that schools in Britain are no longer to be expected to teach about key moments in British history - such as Magna Carta, the leadership of Winston Churchill or the two World Wars - whilst they have to learn about ancient civilizations, including early Islamic civilization.
Christ is the Answer
Neither right-wing political extremism, nor post-modern indifferentism, have the answers to the grave crises now afflicting the remains of our Western civilization.
In conclusion, let us reflect on some important words that we have already quoted here a few times in recent months. They are those of Pope St. Pius X in Quas Primas: ''When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony'' (QP 19).
We would suggest that this is a forgotten lesson which Europe needs to speedily re-learn.
