Point 45. Towards a new Christendom
1. After the capture of Jewish Jerusalem (70) and the fall of pagan Rome (476), a first form of Christendom was gradually constructed in both East and West, which lasted a thousand years. This was “ mediaeval ” Christendom, the brilliant triumph of the evangelical Christian faith, order, and civilisation over every barbarous power. After the defection of the schismatic East and the fall of Constantinople (1453), and then the appalling break of the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Church of the Renaissance and of the Counter-Reformation maintained and extended to the whole world the Catholic faith and the Church’s discipline, using force against Christ’s raging enemies, and exercising an incomparable charm over the pagan nations irresistibly drawn to her light.
2. The Mystery of iniquity of the modern age is unfolding, paradoxically and scandalously, in the centre of Christendom at the very moment of her most marvellous growth. It is from her most faithful and most dynamic centre, from the Latin world this time, that heresy, discord, and revolution against the Catholic faith and against all human order are rearing their heads.
The Church is at the mercy of those of her sons who have emancipated themselves from her divine authority, and they themselves are engaged in fratricidal conflict. On the one side naturalist optimism and on the other side inhuman pessimism have seized the last stronghold of free Christendom, which they argue over and ransack. Catholics are delivered up to their two enemies, to two barbaric powers, to two current scourges, engaged in a world war: pragmatic materialism inspired by Calvin in the West and dialectical materialism inspired by Luther in the East, both subversive, both enemies of Christendom and drawn up against God! What fearful explosions we are about to witness!
3. The collapse of these ideologies and practices – inhuman, catastrophic and aberrant – will come about through their own fault, through their total lack of wisdom, goodness and beauty. Then the billions of human beings who inhabit the earth – going beyond the myths and customs of a collapsed paganism and disillusioned with the false dogmas of an atheistic materialist humanism, both Eastern and Western – will turn their eyes towards Christ.
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