The Future: Bleak Or Bright?
By JOHN YOUNG
Looking at conditions in society today, and in the Catholic Church, it is easy to become pessimistic. Are we heading for a long dark age with civilization giving way to barbarism? Or is the end of the world near, to be preceded by the final great battle between good and evil?
In the area of sexuality views are being pushed which a generation ago would have been seen as insane. Common sense, backed up by biological science, accepts the obvious truth that there are two complementary sexes. But not only is common sense flouted, people who disagree with the insane and unscientific assertions being pushed are in danger of losing their jobs or even going to prison.
False philosophies of life are promoted in the universities and elsewhere, while Christianity is largely ignored, and often misrepresented. Any unbiased view of history shows Christianity to have been the supreme civilizing influence in the world. Instead it is seen as a malign influence.
We should be gravely concerned, and I expect things to deteriorate further, but I also believe there will be a reaction and probably a golden age for the world and the Church. In fact, it is precisely because things are so bad that I expect them to become good.
On the intellectual level there is bound to be a reaction against the skepticism and superficial thinking found among so-called intellectuals today; a return to common sense and to healthy metaphysical principles.
On the practical level people will see by experience the unhappiness caused by breaking the natural moral law. In particular, parents will react when they see the kind of world their children are growing up in, and the indoctrination to which they are subjected in many schools.
There is also a great deal of goodwill and kindness among ordinary people, even though they have gone astray in their beliefs. Nor are things nearly as bad in some countries, particularly in Africa, as they are in the secular West. In fact, Christianity is spreading rapidly in most African countries.
There is also hope for the future when we look at the past and see how bad periods have given place to good periods. I expect a typical pagan in the Roman Empire in the first century AD would have given Christianity only a very poor chance of surviving.
It started with a small group of ordinary people, most of them not well educated, preaching the doctrine of a crucified Savior, a difficult morality at odds with the general outlook, and beliefs such as the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and the Resurrection of the dead at the end of time.
Christians endured centuries of persecution as the authorities tried to stamp them out and the pagan populace often rose up against them, but the result was the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity.
There was a further dark period with the breakup of the Roman Empire and what must have looked like the end of civilization. Yet there arose a new civilization in the Middle Ages, and the wonderful intellectual achievements of the thirteenth century.
The sixteenth century saw the breakup of Christendom and dreadful wars of religion. But then came the great doctrinal achievements of the Council of Trent and the reform of religious life.
The nineteenth century saw a further crisis, with a secular culture threatening to annihilate Christianity. But the First Vatican Council, even though brought to a sudden end by the outbreak of war, led to a clarification and strengthening of the faith.
Reflection on history leads to the conclusion that there will be a swing away from the aberrations afflicting the Western world today, to a much healthier society. But I believe things will get worse before they improve, with repression of free speech becoming more widespread and more blatant.
The trend to force parents to accept the sexual indoctrination of their children in schools will intensify, even with their children taken away from them if they refuse. Catholic schools will be in greater danger of prosecution if they teach Christian doctrine on the nature of marriage and sexuality.
Paradoxically, persecution strengthens the faith, as shown historically. Tertullian, in the second century, gives us the famous expression, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” So if a period of persecution is looming we can be sure that it will eventually lead to a purifying of the faith.
The supernatural dimension of life must never be forgotten, nor the way that the Holy Spirit vivifies the Church. This was indicated very vividly by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was an Evangelical, in a famous statement in 1840. I’ll quote part of it.
“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church….No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre….
“The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. . . . She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshiped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”
