Europe’s Great Defender: Viktor Orbán and Christian Democracy

Joseph Pearce

The rise of populist movements across Europe is seen most potently in the success of the Hungarian Civic Alliance, which, under the tenacious leadership of Viktor Orbán, has been the ruling party in Hungary since 2010. A recent speech by Mr. Orbán, given on September 21 in Rome, will be music to the ears of those hoping for the resurrection of Christian Europe.

One of the first things that one notes about Mr. Orbán is the absence of any arrogance or bombast, or any of the chauvinism that is all too common in the rhetoric of the proponents of a certain kind of nationalism. Take, for instance, the humble and self-deprecating way in which he, the Prime Minister of Hungary, began his speech, thanking his Italian hosts:

The interest you show is both flattering and touching. You are Italians and I am Hungarian. The population of Italy is six times that of Hungary, and its area is three and a half times that of our country. The size of your GDP belongs in another category. You have a huge army, and Hungary’s can’t be mentioned in the same breath as it. Italian is spoken around the world, while Hungarian is spoken only by us. In such circumstances your interest is truly an honour.

Mr. Orbán then explained that Hungary’s refusal to bow before its European masters, defending its national sovereignty, had raised the ire of powerful forces on both sides of the Atlantic. Hungary, he said, “was immediately attacked in Brussels, by the European Left, and also by the American Left through networks allied to George Soros.” This had made Hungary “a black sheep” but it had also made it an inspiration to many people around the world. To put Mr. Orbán’s words in the proverbial nutshell, Hungary has taken centre stage, in spite of its smallness, because of its heroic resistance to the European Union’s efforts to erode its national freedom.

Mr. Orbán then reminded his audience of his political track record as a champion of democracy in the face of communist tyranny. Between 1984 and 1990 he had organised anti-communist student resistant movements. Having given his credentials, he highlighted the hypocrisy of those who condemn him for being a tyrant: “Of course the fact that we took part in the anti-communist resistance and fought for democracy is disregarded by many people in Brussels when they try to lecture us on democracy: something which they received as a gift, but which we had to work hard for.”

Mr. Orbán has been a Member of Parliament in Hungary since the fall of communism and the first free election in 1990. Since then he has formed a government on four different occasions, the first of which was when he was only 35 years old. Since 2010, he and his party have won three consecutive elections, each with a two-thirds majority.

As always, Mr. Orbán was forthright in his opposition to the rising tide of Islamic immigration:

So the first issue which arouses interest is migration. As I see it, in 2015 an invasion set out for Europe. From the very beginning one could see that nine out of ten migrants were not refugees, but economic migrants. Whoever claims that this couldn’t be known is not telling the truth: it was possible to see this clearly, and every European leader knew it. In 2015 I saw that there were leaders in Europe who were going to ruin the European way of life, European culture, and through this the European economy. I always knew that the Left has an intellectual conception which uses migration in its service and in its interest. The Left’s intellectual conception is that Europe should move beyond the age of nations and Christianity, and that the continent should step into a post-national, post-Christian age. And in the conception of the Left, the mission of Brussels and the European Union is to assist this transition. In opposition to this, and confronting this conception, the Right speaks about an alliance of nations.

Mr. Orbán insisted that immigration was supported by the Left because “it serves its ideological goals.” Furthermore, the fact that the immigrants are Muslims means that they will “never support policies which are based on Christian foundations.”

In spite of these justifiable fears, the Hungarian Prime Minister does not advocate a policy of indifference to those who are struggling and suffering in what he calls “crisis regions in the world,” insisting that “the right approach is for us to take help over there, and not bring the problems here.” Practising what he preaches, he has helped forge a loose alliance of nations and regions seeking to offer aid to those in the “crisis regions.”

One of the most exciting aspects of Mr. Orbán’s political philosophy is his unabashed reference to its Christianity. Furthermore, what he calls Hungary’s “Christian democratic economic model” is proving very successful. In 2010 unemployment in Hungary stood at 12 per cent; in 2019 it’s only 3.5 per cent. State debt was 85 per cent of GDP in 2010; now it’s under 70 per cent and falling. The budget deficit was always above 3 per cent but now it’s between 1 and 2 per cent. Economic growth in Hungary is between 4 and 5 per cent, and wages are rising at a rate of 8 to 10 per cent. “Poverty is falling dramatically,” Mr. Orbán stated, “and the middle class is continuously expanding.” With this array of economic successes to his name, it is little surprise that Mr. Orbán and his government have the support of the Hungarian people, as shown in the past three election results.

Mr. Orbán explained that the model for his country’s success was the foundation of a new Christian constitution, which was adopted in 2011. “We used our two-thirds parliamentary majority to write a new Christian constitution with two-thirds majority support,” he explained. “And in order for everyone to understand its essence we adopted this constitution at Easter.” He then proceeded to read selected passages from the new constitution, commencing with the following declaration of Hungary’s Christian heritage and its place within Christian Europe: We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian state on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago. We are proud of our forebears who fought for the survival, freedom and independence of our country. We are proud that our nation has over the centuries defended Europe in a series of struggles, and enriched Europe’s common values with its talent and diligence. We recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood. 

Having pledged its adherence to its Christian roots, the Constitution also declares that the protection of the constitutional identity and Christian culture of Hungary shall be an obligation of every organ of the state.

And it continues, Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation. Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parents and children. Hungary shall encourage the commitment to have children.

“Such things are written into the Hungarian constitution,” Mr. Orbán said, “and . . . this constitution provides the foundation for our politics.”

Having enunciated the principles of the new Christian constitution as the very foundation of his government’s policies, he then spoke of the “three pillars which support our system.” The first is the family, “which must be defended and which clearly can only be the union of one man and one woman,” and which is seen and valued from the perspective of children. In accordance with this child-friendly and pro-life approach to marriage and the family, Mr. Orbán’s government has instituted a family support system, including tax allowances. Women who have had four children, regardless of whether the children are now adults, are exempt from income tax for the rest of their lives. As if this were not a radical enough measure, Mr. Orbán stated that he is now working to extend the tax exemption to women who have had three children. “We provide loans for people starting a family, and if children are born these loans do not have to be paid back.” School textbooks, crèches, kindergartens, and school meals are free. “Despite this,” Mr. Orbán says, “I cannot say that things are as they should be. I can’t say that. Despite this, things are not as they should be in Hungary, because it’s still the case that far fewer children are being born than are needed. And I dare not tell you that we shall definitely be successful in reversing this negative trend; but I can definitely say that if we don’t act with that aim in mind, it will never be reversed. And I’m not willing to support a policy which seeks to correct the shortfall in children being born by bringing in migrants. The best migrant is one’s own child.”

If the family is the first pillar of Mr. Orbán’s “Christian democratic political system,” the second pillar is the nation itself:

In our way of thinking the nation is sovereign, therefore it shall not be forced to subject itself to the laws of any form of global governance. It is the product of culture and history and is an irreplaceable treasure, and therefore it must be protected. And only we may say who can and who cannot settle on the territory of our state, together with our nation. Only we have the right to say that.

The third pillar of the Hungarian political conception of the state is what Mr. Orbán calls “Christian freedom”:

Christian freedom means that we have the right to defend our own Christian way of life; we have the right to defend everything that – derived from Christianity over the course of two thousand years, from the accumulated lives of successive generations – has created a Christian culture. We are free to defend it. This is the political meaning of Christian freedom.

At the conclusion of his inspiring speech, Mr. Orbán stated that although “we are in a minority among the European political elite, we are in the majority among peoples and citizens.” The opponents of Christian democratic principles were “large, wealthy, strong and well-organised,” forcing Christians to fight a battle which is unjustly difficult. “We are fighting for a good cause in unfairly difficult circumstances.” Telling his audience that the fight will remain difficult, he warned of the dangers of both complacency and self-pity.

As for Mr. Orbán’s final words, they are sufficiently inspiring to serve as the final words of this writer’s small act of homage in reporting them. Nothing else need be said because this courageous man’s final words say it all:

We must do what our forebears taught us, when they said: “Trust in God and keep your powder dry.” That’s what we must do. And it’s worth reminding ourselves . . . that Europe was made great and was given its mission in the world by the fact that we created a way of life in which the work that each one of us did – the labour of every working European – simultaneously served one’s own interest, the good of one’s country, and the glory of God. In Europe we must find the modern form of this. And if we succeed in this, Europe will be great again.

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/10/europes-great-defender-viktor-orban-christian-democracy-joseph-pearce.html

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http://www.courageouspriest.com/wrath-god-revealed

Breaking News, The Wrath of God is Being Revealed

The Revelation of the Wrath, Romans 1 – Is It a Prophetic Interpretation of Reality for Our Times?

By Msgr. Charles Pope, Community in Mission:

Scripture is a prophetic interpretation of reality. That is, it tells us what is really going on from the perspective of the Lord of History. An inspired text, it traces out not only the current time, but also the trajectory, the end to which things tend. It is of course important for us to read Scripture with the Church, and exercising care, to submit our understanding to the rule of faith and the context of Sacred Tradition.

With those parameters in mind, I would like to consider Romans 1, wherein St. Paul describes the grave condition of the Greco-Roman culture of his day. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he prophetically interpreted the times of the first century A.D. Although the text speaks specifically to those times, it is clear that our modern times are becoming nearly identical to what was described.

St. Paul saw a once-noble culture in grave crisis; it was in the process of being plowed under by God for its willful suppression of the truth.

Let’s take a look at the details of this prophetic interpretation of those days and apply it to our own. The text opens without any niceties and the words rain down on us almost like lead pellets.

I. The Root of the Ruin – The text says, The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.

As the curtain draws back, we not eased into the scene at all. We are confronted at once with the glaring lights of judgment and the fearsome word “wrath.” Note that the wrath of God is called a revelation. That is to say, it is a word of truth that reveals and prophetically interprets reality for us. The wrath is the revelation!

It’s quite astonishing, really. It directly contradicts to our modern tendency to see God only as the “affirmer in chief,” whose love for us is understood only in sentimental terms, never in terms of a strong love that insists on what is right and true, on what we need rather than what we want.

What is the wrath of God? It is our experience of the total incompatibility of unrepented sin before the holiness of God. The unrepentant sinner cannot endure His presence, His holiness. For such a one, there is wailing and grinding of teeth, anger, and even rage when confronted by the existence of God and the demands of His justice and holiness. God’s wrath does not mean that He is in some simplistic sense angry, emotionally worked up. God is not moody or unstable. He is not subject to temper tantrums as we are. Rather, it is that God is holy and the unrepentant sinner cannot endure His holiness; the sinner experiences it as wrath.

To the degree that God’s wrath is in Him, it is His passion to set things right. God is patient and will wait and work to draw us to repentance, but his justice and truth cannot forever tarry. When judgment sets in on a person, culture, civilization, or epoch, His holiness and justice are revealed as wrath to the unrepentant.

What was the central sin of St. Paul’s (and our own) time? They suppress the truth by their wickedness (Romans 1:18). It is the sin that leads to every other problem.

Note this well: those who seek to remain in their wickedness suppress the truth. On account of wickedness and a desire to persist in sin, many suppress the truth. The catechism of the Catholic Church warns,

The human mind … is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful (Catechism of the Catholic Church # 37).

St. Paul wrote this to St. Timothy:

For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear (2 Tim 4:3).

Isaiah described this:

They say to the seers, “See no more visions”; to the prophets, “Give us no more visions of what is right; tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions” (Isaiah 30:10).

Yes, on account of a desire to cling to their sin and to justify themselves, people suppress the truth. While this human tendency has always existed, there is a widespread tendency for people of our own time in the decadent West to go on calling good, or “no big deal,” what God calls sinful.

When we do this, we suppress the truth. Now, as then, the wrath of God is being revealed. On account of the sin of repeated, collective, obstinate suppression of the truth, God’s wrath is being revealed on the culture of the decadent West.

II. The Revelation that is Refused – The text goes on to say, … and since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse (Romans 1:19-20).

Note that God the Holy Spirit and St. Paul attest that the suppression of the truth is willful; it is not merely ignorance. While the pagans of St. Paul’s day did not have the Scriptures, they are still “without excuse.” Why? Because they had the revelation of creation. Creation reveals God and speaks not only to His existence, but also to his attributes, to His justice and power, to His will and the good order He instills in us and thus expects of us.

All of this means that even those raised outside the context of faith, whether in the first century or today, are “without excuse.”

The Catechism also couches our responsibility to discover and live the truth in the existence of something called the conscience:

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. … For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. … His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. … Moral conscience … bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to the supreme Good to which the human person is drawn, and it welcomes the commandments. …. [Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ (CCC #1776-1778).

Because of the witness and revelation of the Created order, and on account of the conscience present and operative in all who have attained the use of reason, those who suppress the truth are without excuse. They are suppressing what they know to be true.

It has been my experience in my many years as a pastor working with sinners (and as a sinner myself) that those I must confront about sin know full well what they are doing. They may have suppressed the still, small voice of God; they may have sought to keep His voice at bay with layers of rationalization; they may have also collect false teachers to confirm them in their sin and permitted many deceivers to tickle their ears. Deep down, though, they know that what they do is wrong. At the end of the day they are without excuse.

Some lack of due discretion may ameliorate the severity of their culpability, but ultimately they are without excuse for suppressing the truth.

So there is also the revelation of creation, the Word of God (which has been heard by most people today), and the conscience. Many people today, as in St. Paul’s time, refuse revelation. They do so willfully in order to justify wickedness; they are without excuse.

III. The Result in the Ranks – The text says, For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but became vain in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles (Romans 1:21-23).

This should seem very familiar. In St. Paul’s day, and even more so in ours, a prideful culture has set aside God, whether through explicit atheism and militant secularism or through neglect and willful tepidity. Today, God has been pushed to the margins of our proud, anthropocentric culture. His wisdom has been forcibly removed from our schools and from the public square. His image and any reminders of Him are increasingly being removed by force of law. Many people even mock His Holy Name, mentioning His truth only to scorn it as a vestige of the “dark ages.”

Faith and the magnificent deposit of knowledge and culture that has come with it has been scoffed at as a relic from times less scientific than our own much more “enlightened” age.

Our disdainful culture has become a sort of iconoclastic “anti-culture,” which has systematically put into the shredder every bit of Godly wisdom it can. The traditional family, human sexuality, chastity, self-control, moderation, and nearly all other virtues have been scorned and willfully smashed by the iconoclasts of our time. To them, everything of this sort must go.

As a prophetic interpretation of reality, the Scripture from Romans describes the result of suppressing the truth and refusing to acknowledge and glorify God: … they became vain in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools (Romans 1:21).

Yes, there is a powerful darkening effect that comes from suppressing the truth and refusing the wisdom and revelation of God. While claiming to be so wise, smart, advanced, we have collectively speaking become foolish and vain; our intellects grow darker by the day. Our concern for vain, foolish, passing things knows little bounds today. Yet the things that really do matter: death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell, are almost never attended to. We run after foolish things but cannot seem to exercise the least bit of self-control. Our debts continue to grow but we cannot curb our spending. We cannot make or keep commitments. Addiction is increasingly widespread. All of the most basic indicators indicate that we have grave problems: graduation rates, SAT scores, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion rates, divorce rates, cohabitation rates. The numbers that should be going up are down and the numbers that should be going down are up.

Although we claim to be so wise and smart today, we have become collectively foolish. Even our ability to think of solutions and to have intelligent conversations has decreased, since we cannot seem to agree on even the most basic points. We simply talk past one other, living in our own smaller and increasingly self-defined worlds.

If you think that the line about idolatry doesn’t apply today, you’re kidding yourself.People are fascinated by stones and rocks, and by all sorts of syncretistic combinations of religions, including the occult. This is the age of the “designer God,” when people no longer tolerate the revealed God of the Scriptures, but believe instead in a reinvented one—who just so happens to agree with everything they think. Yes, idolatry is alive and well in this age of the personal sort of hand-carved idol that can be invoked over and against the true God of the Scriptures.

And people today congratulate themselves for being tolerant, open-minded, and non-judgmental! It is hard not see that our senseless minds have become dark, our thoughts vain, and our behavior foolish.

Our culture is in the very grave condition that this Scripture, this prophetic interpretation of reality, describes. There is much for which we should be rightfully concerned.

IV. The Revelation of the Wrath – The text says, Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error (Rom 1:24-27).

In this passage the “wrath” is revealed. The text simply says, God gave them over to their sinful desires. This is the wrath; this is the revelation of the total incompatibility of unrepented sin before the holiness of God and the holiness to which we are summoned.

In effect, God is saying, if you want sin and rebellion, you can have it. It’s all yours. You’ll experience the full consequences of your sinful rebellion, the full fury of your own sinful choices. Yes, God gave them over to their sinful desires.

It seems that God has also given us over in a similar way to our sinful desires today.

Note that the first and most prominent effect is sexual confusion. The text describes sexual impurity, the degradation of their bodies, shameful lusts, and the shameful acts of homosexual relations. The text also speaks of “due” penalty for such actions, probably disease and other deleterious effects that result from using the body for purposes for which it is not designed.

Welcome to the 21st century decaying West.

Many misunderstand what Romans 1 is saying. They point to this text as a warning that God will punish us for condoning and celebrating homosexual acts. But Romans 1 does not say that God will punish us for this; it says that the widespread condoning and celebrating of homosexual acts is God’s punishment; it is the revelation of wrath. It is the first and chief indication that God has given us over to our stubborn sinfulness and to our lusts.

Let us be careful to make a distinction here. The text does not say that homosexuals are being punished; some may mysteriously have this orientation but live chastely. Rather, it is saying that we are all being punished.

Why? For over 60 years now the decadent West has celebrated promiscuity,pornography, fornication, cohabitation, contraception, and even to some extent adultery. The resulting carnage of abortion, STDs, AIDs, single motherhood, absent fathers, poverty, and emotionally damaged children does not seem to have been enough to bring us to our senses. Our lusts have only become wilder and more debased.

Through the use of contraception, we severed the connection between sex, procreation, and marriage. Sex has been reduced to two adults doing what they please in order to have fun or share love (really, lust). This has opened the door to increasingly debased sexual expression and to irresponsibility.

Enter the homosexual community and its demands for acceptance. The wider culture, now debased, darkened, and deeply confused, cannot comprehend the obvious: that homosexual acts are contrary to nature. The very design of the body shouts against it. But the wider culture, already deeply immersed in its own confusion about sex and now an increasing diet of ever-baser pornography that celebrates both oral and anal sex among heterosexuals, has had no answer to the challenge.

We have gone out of our minds. Our senseless minds are darkened, confused, foolish, and debased. This is wrath. This is what it means to be given over to our sinful desires. This is what happens when God finally has to say to a culture, if you want sin you can have it—until it comes out of your ears!

How many tens of millions of babies have been aborted, sacrificed to our wild lusts?How deep has been the pain caused by rampant divorce, cohabitation, adultery, and STDs? Yet none of this has caused us to repent.

In all of this, The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Notice again, homosexuals are not being singled out; The wrath is against all the godlessness and wickedness of those who suppress the truth. When even the carnage has not been enough to bring us to our senses, God finally says, enough, and gives us over to our own sinful desires to feel their full effects. We have become so collectively foolish and vain in our thinking and darkened in our intellect that as a culture we now “celebrate” homosexual acts, which Scripture rightly calls disordered. (The word St. Paul uses in this passage to describe homosexual acts is paraphysin, meaning “contrary to nature.”) Elsewhere, Scripture speaks of these as acts of grave depravity that cry to Heaven for vengeance.

But as the text says, Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them (Romans 1:32). This is darkness; this is wrath.

This is the result of being given over to our sins: a deeply darkened mind. The celebration of homosexual acts is God’s punishment and it demonstrates that He has given us over.

V. The Revolution that Results – The text says, Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy (Romans 1:28-31).

The text states clearly and in very familiar terms the truth that when sex, marriage, and family go into the shredder, an enormous number of social ills are set loose.

This is because children are no longer properly formed. The word “bastard” in its common informal usage refers to a despicable person, but its more “technical” definition is an illegitimate child. Both senses are related. This text says, in effect, that when God gives us over to our sinful desires, we start to act like bastards.

Large numbers of children raised outside the best setting of a father and a mother in a stable traditional family is a recipe for the social disaster described in these verses. I will not comment on them any further; they speak for themselves.

VI. The Refusal to Repent – Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them (Romans 1:32).

Here, too, is the mystery of our iniquity, of our stubborn refusal to repent no matter how high the cost, how clear the evidence. Let us pray we will come to our senses. God has a record of allowing civilizations to come and go, nations to rise and fall. If we do not love life, we do not have to have it. If we want lies rather than truth, we can have them and we will feel their full effects.

Somewhere God is saying,

When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place (2 Chron 7:14-15).

Oremus!

A Dark-Forces Assault on the Church?

William Kilpatrick

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers … against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Eph. 6:12)

It’s not easy to discern the role played by the spiritual hosts of wickedness in world affairs. No one knows with any certainty what is going on in that realm, or what part the principalities and powers play in shaping events. But these are exceedingly strange times—so strange that it is difficult to make sense of some of what is happening from a this-worldly perspective. So it seems worthwhile to try to understand some phenomena from an other-worldly viewpoint.

One of the strangest developments of our times is the Church’s response to Islam and Islamic migration. Since the response runs entirely counter to the Church’s historical response, it seems legitimate to wonder if other-worldly forces are at play. If that’s the case, it should not be unexpected. Christ promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church, but the implication of his words is that hell would surely try.

Over the years, various popes have testified to this effort. In the late nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII reportedly had a vision of demonic spirits during the celebration of Mass. This led him to institute the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel (“be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil”), which is said at the end of a Low Mass in the Extraordinary Form. In more recent times, on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in 1972, Pope Paul VI delivered a sermon warning that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”

What may come as a surprise to those who worry about Pope Francis’s liberal tendencies is that he also has frequently warned of Satan’s influence. A few months after his election, he consecrated Vatican City State to St. Michael the Archangel who “defends the people of God from the arch-enemy par excellence, the devil.” When he was a cardinal in Argentina, he described a legislative proposal to redefine marriage as “a ‘move’ of the father of lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

If the smoke of Satan can enter the Catholic Church, there is no reason to suppose it cannot enter other religions as well. Without getting into the question of whether Muhammad was deceived by Satan, as some maintain, it is probable that Satan seeks to influence the direction of Islam just as he strives to have a malign influence on the Catholic Church.

It may be, then, that the current situation of the Church vis-à-vis Islam is due in part to a dual assault—one aimed at heightening Islam’s traditional aggressiveness, and the other aimed at weakening the Church’s traditional defenses. The result is a kind of dance of death: a ramping up of Islamic militancy matched by an exaggerated emphasis on tolerance, openness, and welcoming on the part of Catholics.

If this is the case, then one manifestation of the Catholic folly might be the Church’s attitude toward mass Muslim migration. Many Catholic leaders think of Muslim migration as no different from other migrations. For them it is simply a question of being welcoming or unwelcoming, of being charitable or uncharitable. But many Muslim leaders view migrations in a different light. For them it is not a question of loving one’s neighbor, it is a question of who is to be master.

If history continues on its present course, Islam will be the master of much of Europe within a relatively short time. This change of ownership will result from a combination of migration, high birth rates, and willful blindness on the part of Europe’s leaders. And it will result in a great deal of misery. The astonishing thing is that this massive threat to Europe and European Christianity scarcely registers in the Vatican. To the extent that it does register, it is dismissed as a low priority concern. Witness the pope’s recent claim that the safety of refugees should be given priority over national security.

For the most part, however, concerns over Muslim aggressiveness are simply brushed aside. Such concerns are viewed by Church leaders as signs of intolerance, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. Since the term “phobia” refers to an irrational fear, the suggestion is that the fears are groundless. But those who fear Islam’s spread seem to have the facts on their side. Their concern are grounded not only in the frequent knife, bomb, and truck attacks, but also in extensive data about the connection between Muslim migration and skyrocketing rates of violent and non-violent crime in Europe.

Against the hard evidence that increased immigration will be suicidal for Europe, the pope offers vague humanistic sentiments about “encounter,” “mutual enrichment,” and the beneficial effect of “the exchange between cultures.” Pope Francis says that those Europeans who resist migration are guilty of “intolerance, discrimination, and xenophobia.” That may be true of some, but many are simply worried that they or their children will become victims of assault or worse. The failure to recognize these legitimate fears is a form of hardheartedness. Moreover, the pie-in-the-sky attitude toward the migration situation on the part of many in the hierarchy could be considered a form of presumption.

Consider a couple of lines from Pope Francis’s address to the Council of Episcopal Conferences of Europe (CCEE) in September. “Temptations to exclusiveness and cultural entrenchment have not been wanting in the history of the Church,” said the pope, “but the Holy Spirit has always helped us to overcome them, guaranteeing a constant openness toward the other, considered as a concrete possibility of growth and enrichment.” He continues: “the Holy Spirit will help us to keep an attitude of trusting openness that will allow us to overcome every barrier and scale every wall.”

This seems to border on presumption. It’s a little akin to saying “If you jump off the cliff in a spirit of trust, the Holy Spirit won’t let you fall.” It was “trusting openness” that got Europe into its present predicament, but Francis is suggesting that the Holy Spirit will get us out of whatever further mess we create if only we accelerate the rate of trusting openness.

I may be overlooking something, but I don’t recall any Biblical injunctions to “constant openness” or “trusting openness” in regard to one’s fellow man. Instead, there are quite a few warnings about the untrustworthiness of fallen man.

Pope Francis appears to be ignoring the warnings. 

As social critic Hugh Fitzgeraldputs it:

At any time, such naivete and heedlessness as Pope Francis exhibits would be difficult to take. At this moment in world history, when the leader of the Catholic Church appears determined not to understand the meaning, and menace, of Islam, while Christians are everywhere under assault by Muslims, and Muslims are knocking at Europe’s gates and demanding to be let in without delay… his complacent buonismo [goody-goodiness] is intolerable.

In short, the pope’s response is almost the exact opposite of the response that the times seem to require. The major event of our time is the reemergence of Islam on the world stage. Yet Francis, along with others in the hierarchy, is acting as though this were still the sixties—a time when Islam was relatively quiescent. As a result, he responds to the resurgence of Islamic terror with 60s-era bromides about “encounter” and “openness.”

By all accounts, the devil is immensely intelligent. It’s been said that one of his greatest achievements in modern times is to convince people that he doesn’t exist. It may be that his second biggest achievement is to convince Church leaders that Islam is not a threat at that precise moment when the threat to Christians is growing exponentially.

If indeed the Church leadership is being subject to an assault from below, it is a particularly clever one. That’s because it takes advantage of the best Christian instincts—particularly the impulse to charity. The most persuasive part of the hierarchy’s appeal to welcome Muslim migrants, no matter how many, are the constant reminders that this is what Christ wants us to do. When the pope recently launched the “Share the Journey” campaign for solidarity with migrants, he observed that “Christ himself asks us to welcome our brother and sister migrants with arms wide open.” On other occasions he has said that “we see the face of Christ himself” in the face of migrants. On still other occasions he has likened the journey of refugees to the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt.

Even if it’s being misapplied, the appeal to scripture is difficult to resist. It somehow seems small-minded and selfish to worry about personal safety when we are reminded of Christ’s words, “I was a stranger and you took me in.”

Still, one has to wonder about charitable impulses that facilitate the takeover of Europe by a decidedly anti-Christian religious ideology. How charitable is it to consign Europeans, their children, and their grandchildren to a life of bloodshed and civil war, or else to a life of subservient dhimmitude such as Christians now experience in many parts of the Muslim world?

So, the Church’s welcoming response to Islam and Islamic migration can be looked upon as a shining example of Christian charity, or it can be looked upon as an example of stubborn foolishness and presumption in the face of a fast-spreading evil. It’s a devilishly complicated situation. And that should make us wonder if the devil himself isn’t intimately involved in it.

Of course, as I admitted at the outset, this is speculation. No one knows for certain how supernatural powers affect human events. It could be that, looked at from the perspective of eternity, the pope has chosen the right path. The subjugation of Europe by Islam could be a necessary part of God’s plan. An Islamic takeover of Europe might conceivably be a chastisement for European decadence: the natural and supernatural effect of decades of birth control, abortion, and self-centeredness.

Or it could be that the entry en masse of Muslims into Europe will be the occasion of their conversion. Pope Francis seems to be of this mind. On several occasions he has spoken of migration as a cultural encounter and exchange which leads almost inevitably to the mutual enrichment of the cultures involved. In his talk to the CCEE, Francis said that “the Church has spread through every continent thanks to the ‘migration’ of so many missionaries.” Now, he seems to envision a reverse process in which potential converts migrate to Christian lands and encounter both the generosity of Christians and the spirit of European humanism. The pope seems to believe that this encounter can lead to conversion as long as we have faith that “the Holy Spirit will help us to keep an attitude of trusting openness that will allow us to overcome every barrier and scale every wall.”

Maybe so. But, once again, this smacks of presumption. All the historical evidence suggests that when Muslims move into other cultures either by migration or by conquest, conversions are a one-way street. With a few exceptions, Muslims don’t convert to the faith of the people they encounter. The non-Muslims convert to Islam. Christian North Africa—the land of St. Augustine—succumbed to Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, and it has never been re-Christianized. To expect that today’s European Christians can accomplish what the hardier Christians of 1300 years ago could not is highly presumptuous.

As mentioned earlier, Pope Francis is acutely aware of Satan’s ability to manipulate Christians. But he is also in many ways a man of the left. As such, he is vulnerable to the liberal illusion that there is no enemy on the left. He also seems disposed toward the multicultural illusion that there can be no enemy among the “other.” Thus Francis would have difficulty accepting the reality of a major threat from Islam, let alone from a left-Islamic alliance.

The pope is not oblivious to the possibility of a dark-forces assault on the Church. But in all probability he is expecting the devil to strike from the right by exploiting the fears of all those culturally entrenched xenophobes and Islamophobes who want to build walls instead of bridges.

That’s one way of looking at it. But another, more likely scenario, is that the devil is exploiting the gullibility of liberal clergy and laymen—those Catholics that barely believe in his existence, but believe very firmly in openness, encounter, and the peaceful intentions of Islam.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/dark-forces-assault-church

Sky View: To Question a President’s Christian Identity

Sky View: To Question a President’s Christian Identity

"To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice."

Pope Leo XIII, On the Constitution of States

The public, some politicians and some members of the media have questioned if President Barak Obama is really a Christian. Recently, the media- both Left and to an extent, the Right –sees to it that anyone who is bold enough to question Mr. Obama’s Christian identity is publicly disgraced. Thus far, Senator Rick Santorum has come close to making the charge that Obama is not a Christian by questioning his “phony theology.” However, because of the heat of media pressure, he has politely given the president the benefit of the doubt.

It should be noted, however, that at no time in history has the confusion of what a Christian really means been as prevalent as it is today. Not only do people not know what a follower of Christ is supposed to believe and how he is supposed to be behave, but it is deemed socially and politically inappropriate to give a fixed definition of what a Christian really is. And according to conventional wisdom, it is even more inappropriate to question a person’s Christian identity. Indeed, proponents of secular-liberalism have exploited the weakness of today’s Christianity by mounting public pressure on anyone who questions their religious fidelity or patriotism. And Christians, by and large, have acquiesced to this pressure. They have been silenced; not by edict but through the daily threat of ridicule.

But what exactly is the weakness of today’s Christianity? Well, for starters, Protestant Christianity has been splintering and multiplying into thousands of different denominations since the founding of this country. After the persecution and intolerance of certain churches in 18th century America, it became, over the years, a taboo to criticize others on matters of creed. In the name of tolerance there came a reluctance for any church to proclaim, “We’re right and you’re wrong.” With this arose a growing trend that favored religious relativism (and eventually moral relativism). Indeed, all churches and even Christians came to be deemed more or less good.

Secondly, the Catholic Church did a stellar job of avoiding this kind of relativism for about two hundred years in America. She did not shy away from declaring her God-given superiority as the Church that Christ had founded. But that posture changed in the late 1960’s.

Then it became popular among pastors of the Church to give obstinate, unrepentant sinners equal status to that of faithful and repentant Catholics. As such, there was little distinction between the wolves and the sheep. When I speak of the wolves, I here refer to those who refuse to repent from their advocacy of abortion rights and same-sex marriage, from the practice of contraception and cohabitation, and from many other serious sins which daily cause scandal in the Body of Christ.

The result of all of this is that no one seems to know what a Christian is. And with this kind of ambivalence, moral and spiritual relativism reigns supreme. This is why it is deemed socially and politically inappropriate to say whether or not a person like President Obama is a true Christian.

But we know where President Obama stands on moral and policy issues. He is on record for supporting the following:

• Abortion rights

• Infanticide

• Sex education at the age of 5 years

• Same-sex marriage

• The reinstatement of United States Department of Veterans Affairs manual, the version of which is highly suggestive of favoring euthanasia

• Healthcare rationing of the elderly: His comment about having grandma take a pill instead of opting for a costly surgery is indicative of where the president's priorities lie. And Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Regulatory Czar, said the following: “I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”

What is equally disturbing about President Obama’s moral and spiritual philosophy is this: As most know, he was mentored for 20 years under Rev. Jeremiah Wright from Trinity United in Chicago. The reverend publically supported Black Liberation Theology and one of its prominent pioneers, James Cone. Few know that James Cone and Black Liberation Theology in general favors a heavy dose of Marxism. As the president himself maintains, his salvation depends on the collective salvation of the people. Without going into a lot of details, the belief that groups of people should be saved over that of individuals is based on socialistic or Marxist premise. Such a premise is contrary to the Gospel and it is spiritually, morally and politically dangerous to society. The dignity of the individual person has been and will continue to be seriously undermined under such an ideology. We can already see that President Obama and is entourage of Czars and Cabinet members do not hold preborn babies, infants and the elderly in high esteem. Neither do Catholics fare well under their governance.

To be sure, there are certain things we cannot judge. We cannot judge intentions, motives or whether or not a person will be saved in the end. But we can judge whether or not a person is believing and behaving as a follower of Christ should. As our Lord said, "You will know them by their fruits." (Matthew 7:16) In fact, it is the duty of Catholic bishops, pastors, teachers and the laity to make a clear distinction between real Christians and nominal Christians. In the early 20th century, for instance, Pope St. Pius X wrote the following to his priests: "Catholic 'Liberals' are wolves in lambs clothing; hence any priest worthy of the name must unmask for the faithful confided to his care their insidious plotting, their unholy design. You shall be called papists, clericals, retrogressives, intransigents. Be proud of it!" This pastoral wisdom of the saintly pope also applies to Christians in general.

If we cannot say that a “Christian” is not one who would aggressively advances abortion rights, the right to practice infanticide at hospitals and abortion clinics, same-sex rights and healthcare rationing- if we cannot say that this is not what a disciple of Christ does –we are in trouble. We have unnecessarily handicapped ourselves. As such, confusion about what a Christian really is will continue to fog the minds of Americans. The end result is that we will be powerless to resist counterfiet Christianity and those political ideologies which parade themselves in sheeps clothing.

The standard has already been set by Christ, the Apostles, the Church Fathers, the Saints and the Church herself. The legacy of drawing attention to Christians in "name-only" and separating from the flock is legion. There are too many examples to count here. But suffice it to say, this pastoral practice of our Church's watchmen of old secured the moral distinctions between good and evil and the religious distinction between authentic Christians and those who pretended to be Christian for political purposes. We should return to this ancient (and yet not so ancient) practice. The welfare of our country depends on it.