WE ARE AT WAR!!!

Who says there's no Culture War? My next three posts come from three different countries in the Anglosphere, the UK, the US, and Australia. They all represent facets of the battle between sanity, morality and civilisation and the insanity, immorality, and barbarism of the Culture of Death. 

This is no longer simply a matter of keeping our Faith out of the public square or making of it a 'private matter'. The Culture of Death wants to annihilate the Faith! Hilaire Belloc predicted this in 1938, when he wrote the final chapter of his excellent book, The Great Heresies, entitled 'The Modern Phase'.

The enemy which the Faith now has to meet, and which may be called "The Modern Attack," is a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith-upon the very existence of the Faith. And the enemy now advancing against us is increasingly conscious of the fact that there can be no question of neutrality. The forces now opposed to the Faith design to destroy. The battle is henceforward engaged upon a definite line of cleavage, involving the survival or destruction of the Catholic Church. And all-not a portion-of its philosophy.

We know, of course, that the Catholic Church cannot be destroyed. But what we do not know is the extent of the area over which it will survive; its power of revival or the power of the enemy to push it further and further back on to its last defences until it may seem as though anti-Christ had come and the final issue was about to be decided. Of such moment is the struggle immediately before the world.

The truth is becoming every day so much more obvious that within a few years it will be universally admitted. I do not entitle the modern attack "anti-Christ"-though in my heart I believe that to be the true term for it: No, I do not give it that name because it would seem for the moment exaggerated. But the name doesn't matter. Whether we call it "The Modern Attack" or "anti-Christ" it is all one; there is a clear issue now joined between the retention of   Catholic morals, tradition, and authority on the one side, and the active effort to destroy them on the other. The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live. The duel is to the death.

He was, however, incorrect in his opinion of how soon Catholics would realise that it is a battle to the death. He wrote, 'The truth is becoming every day so much more obvious that within a few years it will be universally admitted.' Even today, over 70 years later, there are still people who refuse to admit the obvious.

They think that if only we 'tone it down', we shall be left alone. If we agree to 'live and let live', the enemy will declare a truce. The 'I'm personally opposed, but...' politicians are a shining example of the failure of such a tactic.

Others, like Rod Dreher, suggest withdrawing into a sort of Catholic enclave or compound. I cannot be the only one who thinks that concentrating your forces, which (at least at present) are appreciably weaker than the enemy's, into a 'ghetto' is a tactically mad idea. Siege warfare or the Warsaw Ghetto, anyone? They are out to destroy us! And the sooner we wake up the better. There is no better way to lose the war than to not believe there is a war going on!