III. Restoration Of The Culture

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful”                                                                               

 -Hebrews 10:23

“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit."          - Catechism of the Catholic Church #1817

      While many signs around us point to an inevitable decline and an increasingly sinful, secular, and yes, depraved society, we Christians must hold on to hope, not in our fellow men, but in God, that for His sake, and for that of a small faithful remnant, He and His will cannot be denied. Most people look around at the troubling state of cultural decay and believe it is irreversible, that the current decay and decline leads to an inevitable fall of our Christian civilization, as it did with all the other systems, kingdoms, and cultures before. But unlike every other secular state, we are the Kingdom of God which God promised would be an everlasting kingdom. People often point to the fall of the Roman Empire making parallels to our current cultural, moral, political, and economic decline, which are accurate, but they fail to recognize that Rome had to fall, in order for the Catholic Church to flourish and become the unifying and organizing force for good across Christendom, without force or political pressure. Sometimes when things appear like they are falling apart, to God, they are simply falling into place.  For God cannot be denied.

      We see countless examples throughout the history of Christendom, that when defeat seemed inevitable, when the preverbal fat lady stepped up to the microphone, the internal and external threats to Christianity, Christian unity, and salvation of whole peoples were miraculously vanquished, through the meager efforts of a faithful few magnified by the boundless grace and providence of God. Look for one example to the violent severing of the Body of Christ by the Protestant Revolution of the 16th Century. Beginning with Luther and the several severing schismatics that followed, six million Catholics were lost from the sacraments and the faith that Christ Himself founded. Yet within 40 years from the revolution, nine million souls were added to the Catholic Church in the New World thanks primarily to the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Even today as we in the West lament about how few Catholics live and practice their faith, our losses are more than made up for by the vibrant growth of Catholicism in Africa and Asia. God will not be denied.

      Resulting from and following the so-called Reformation, came the secular, anti-religion, anti-God eras of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, wherein, among other things, perverted, libertine values replaced the timeless, Biblical morals and virtues. The result was violent, anti-Christian European Revolutions against God and temporal authority that followed in its aftermath, which targeted the Catholic Church and people of faith, leading to a decline in the Church’s beneficial influence upon the lives of the people. But when this steady moral decline seemed all but assured, God raised up great saints and ordinary, faithful families, to stand up usher in slight, short-lived religious, artistic, and moral course corrections known as Romanticism and the Victorian period. God will not be denied.

      Even in the US of A we see the hand of God in the course, and history of our great nation, beginning with the miraculous founding against all odds, to the abolition movement and preservation of the Union. But aside or beyond these unlikely military victories, we see the return of men to their God, in not one but two great religious revivals. For many great men and women, including our greatest Presidents, realized that God would not bless our nation until and unless we returned to Him, and lived as a moral, just society, under God. Thanks to the First Great Awakening (1720’s-1770’s) hundreds of thousands began practicing their faith, leading to a social, religious, and moral revival, and influenced many of the founders who heretofore had drunk deeply from the fount of the secular                              . The Second Great Awakening (1790’s-1850’s) was the vaccine that saved our country from being infected with the virus of the French Revolution, and directly led to the abolition movement. Again God will not be denied.

      But this needed reversal of the spiritual, moral, and social, declines we all see and despise, is not limited to past history, as we see the new buds of this spiritual springtime in Hungary, Croatia, France, and even Russia of all places. For although the secular, multicultural European Union purposely removed God from its Constitution, completely rejecting God and its Christian heritage, cementing its folly and its inevitable failure, the new Constitution of Hungary, enacted in 2011, marked a much-needed acknowledgement of and return to God. The Hungarian Constitution opens with “God Bless the Hungarians” and proceeds to establish that:

• Christianity as the basic religion of the Hungarian people;
• the protection of life from the moment of conception and prohibition of eugenics;
• the family based on marriage between a man and a woman;
• parental duties toward children but also children’s duties toward elderly parents;
• the responsibility before God of the Members of Parliament who approve the Constitution;
• the ethnic basis of the nation, with safeguards for the rights of resident minorities,

This shows that such a public return to God and Christianity is possible in this post-modern, secular, multicultural, utopian nightmare we’re living through.

      In Croatia we see in what may be Europe’s most Catholic country (90%), voters standing up for traditional marriage easily defeated the proposed change in definition with more than 65% following Church teaching. Similarly in France, in 2013 we saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets of Paris to protest the legalization of homosexual marriage, and more recently more than a million gather to stand up against Islamic extremism, signaling there may be a wider awakening in Europe against the disastrous multicultural policies creating the enemy within. Interestingly, and consistent with the family-first renewal of the culture, France’s recent religious revival began seemingly out of the blue, with the national controversy created by the Cardinal of Paris’ prayer that children “enjoy fully the love of a father and mother." 

      Then there’s Russia, which, though led by a former KGB officer, and embarking upon a troubling political, economic, and military course, particularly in the foreign relations realm, has made several remarkable strides in the spiritual and moral arenas, hopefully thanks to the fulfillment of the Fatima request. Here are a few of the recent changes:

          - prohibits all abortion advertising;
          - mandatory teaching of religion and ethics in schools;
          - prohibits teaching homosexual “lifestyle” to minors;
          - supports religious freedom and donates millions to repair/preserve Churches;

          - protects Christians in Middle East

      So if a religious revival can happen in former communist, atheist, Russia, where Christianity was all but extinguished, but now experiences overflowing attendance and record numbers of vocations, it can happen in the Christian West. For those who take the long view of history, we see that a decline does not always lead to an inevitable fall, which the greatest recorded example being the history of Israel as recorded in the Bible. There we see how horrible kings and his subjects completely turn away from God, even worshipping idols and committing all sorts of detestable acts, causing God to turn His face and remove His providence from them, only to return His loving gaze as a new king, or a faithful remnant return to Him in repentance and humility. God always keeps His promises, despite our repeated failures, and sent His Son in the fullness of time to an unfaithful, unworthy people, and will do so again to an equally unworthy Christendom, if we only turn our focus back to Him. And we don’t need to do it all ourselves, nor could we, we only need to start on that path back to Him, like the prodigal son, and our heavenly Father will run toward us and meet us on the way, restoring all things in Him.

       Make no mistake, the above examples are just a few of the many hopeful signs of another great religious awakening. For though the landscape may look bleak to our generation, it’s not as dire as it was just a generation ago. Since the 1960’s, when the combined forces of immorality and evil conspired to eliminate religion, driving it to the very shadows where she would be left to wither and die, replacing it with pleasure, reason, and other secular dystopian nonsense, it is secularism, the failed experiment of the Enlightenment, not spirituality, which seems destined for the junk heap of human history. For many of these progressives of the past that predicted the death of God and Christianity, would be amazed and disturbed by the religious renaissance that seems well underway, spreading heart to heart and house to house, renewing our churches and our culture along the way.

Enlightenment