Darkening Unto Night
By Timothy J Cullen " The fundamental things apply/As time goes by" (Herman Hupfeld) When the twilight of the West gives way to night, authentic Catholics who follow tradition will be well positioned in terms of protecting their immortal souls from a far worse descent into darkness, a darkness almost immemorially known as Hell. Those who believe that they will finally gain societal power sufficient to create an earthly utopia for their poor, benighted, sadly-less-"intelligent" inferiors may be in for the shock of their lives: "utopia" was always imaginary and always will be in this the fallen world; it’s really that simple.
This writer imagines and is close to being convinced that while there will not be a near-term collapse of Western civilization, night will encroach upon it before some "black swan" event shocks lapsed Catholics into returning to the true fold and rejecting the sentimental and therefore suicidal silliness of the ill-starred "Modernist" uprising within the Catholic Church, never mind the reactions of those non-Catholics for whom the scales will fall from their eyes and the ugly truth of the secular materialist mirage be revealed. That will be the time amidst darkness when the light of the Church’s Truth will begin to brighten the horizon of those who were manipulated into abandoning their faith, at least in their minds if not in their hearts.
Night inevitably gives way to day, and so it will be for the Faith and the Church. As the civilization of the West declines to whatever low point it eventually does, it is quite likely that another of the world’s major civilizations will ascend in secular power. Civilizations rise, civilizations decline, civilizations fall and on occasion rise again, although not to their former heights, or so we learn reading philosophical historians such as Spengler and Toynbee, along with their more recent fellows Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) and Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008), whose seminal works (respectively) Tragedy and Hope (1966) and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) merit reading by any serious student of history, regardless of the extent of one’s agreements and disagreements with the theses put forward by the authors. Catholics, however, in the final accounting are compelled by faith to be optimistic with respect to the longterm future of the Church and Her child, Western civilization.
The "modernized" and increasingly radicalized NO Church of the past half century and a bit is highly likely to be proven to be nothing more than a fad in the fullness of time, perhaps not so long a time, should the present decadence of Western civilization picks up speed: think of the snowball heading down the hill. If civilizational clash becomes civilizational confrontation, as is highly possible given current events, the core values of the separate civilizations will come to the fore; in the case of the West, one can easily draw the inference that traditional Catholicism will thus experience explosive growth, given that it is without question the solid foundation—both religious and cultural—upon which the currently tottering edifice of Western civilization was built. The more serious the confrontation, the more quickly this is likely to occur.
If historian Huntington’s thesis in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order that the great crisis between civilizations is to be cultural rather than ideological, then he is also likely correct in agreeing with "a prominent Indian Muslim… that the West’s ‘next confrontation is definitely going to come from the Muslim world.
It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin’."
1 Religion (secular materialism included), in other words, will return to the forefront of the manner in which civilizations are defined.
Faith, family, clan, tribe and nation: multinational civilizations’ components.
There never has been, isn’t and likely will never be a "global" civilization. The Church had a civilizational authority that transcended kingdoms, principalities, duchies and so on, but with the rupture of the Reformation, nations arose and the identification with the Church as the ultimate civilizational arbiter declined.
Should the West continue its decline, the pendulum of history will begin its arc of return and religion will take on a renewed importance as the embattled West’s inhabitants discover the standard upon which they can rally round.
Beneath the skeptical surface of many a scoffer lies a deep, if untapped, reservoir of yearning for the transcendent: for God, once the scales have fallen from one’s eyes. Civilizational Seismic civilizational disturbances will see this yearning begin to break through surface cynicism. Eventually, the dike of secular materialism may break and religion flood the cities of the plain.
But which religion?
The Bride of Christ over the past half century has become a wife who prefers to serve her children "lite" instant mashed potatoes—manufactured, bland and textureless—rather than feed her flock more hearty fare, one among many explanations of why the NO Church will not serve in societal conditions very different from those of even today, never mind a hundred years ago; only a robust faith will satisfy those who turn away from the pseudo-religion of "scientism".
The conflation of science with scientism will diminish and the disaffected will find their way back to the religions of their forefathers; in the West, that religion is Roman Catholicism in the final account, an authentic and robust Catholicism that restores Christ to His Social Kingdom.
Religious cohesion is strong in Islam in spite of its internecine struggles when it comes to confrontation with other religions; the secular materialist veneer is thin indeed in Islamic societies and their overall civilization and is likely to be stripped quickly in the event of a clash with the West escalating into a crisis, increasingly likely with the injection in large numbers of nonassimilating Muslims into the West, a situation the NO Church is actually and
1 Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, 1996.
incomprehensibly encouraging.
Christianity has been less cohesive than Islam and continues to be so in spite of fifty years of failed ecumenical overtures and Catholicism "lite". Were a clash to begin in earnest between the Christian core of the West and non-assimilated Muslim immigrants into the West, the voice of the Church must be raised in support of Her own, many of whom have gone astray in no small measure because the Church Herself has gone astray. One must sadly conclude, however, that such a voice would not likely be forthcoming during the present pontificate.
It is far less likely that the Christian West will face a religiously motivated clash with what Huntington labeled as the "Orthodox" (Russia, the Russian part of Ukraine, some Balkan states) civilization or the Hindu civilization; it is increasingly likely that they too will clash with Islam, as they have almost entirely throughout their histories in frontier zones. It is far from unimaginable that the Orthodox and their Christian brethren in the West at some time in the future may make common cause in a confrontation with Islam.
And it is far from inconceivable that Christianity could once again become not merely transnational but "transcivilizational" by returning to its roots in Roman Catholicism. As the old saying goes, "There are no atheists in foxholes"; perhaps in a conflict, Christians will finally reunite under the aegis of a Holy Mother Church restored.
The near future, however, is almost certainly one of further decline for the NO Church if not for Tradition, the lamp that will be kept burning in the window of and for the West. When the darkness deepens, Traditional Catholicism will reclaim the Church and fend off the chaos that has befallen Her over the past half century and for however much longer the chaos lasts. Only Tradition can restore the Church to Her rightful place in the Western civilization to which She gave birth, but first She will likely have to endure the passage of a long winter’s night before the pangs of Her own rebirth begin.
Authentic Catholics are rightfully distressed over what at times can appear to be an irreversible decline in the Church during their own lifetimes.
Distress is one thing, despair another, and the vice and mortal sin of despair, as states the Catholic Encyclopedia, has a "power for working harm in the human soul… fundamentally far greater than other sins inasmuch as it cuts off the way of escape and those who fall under its spell are frequently, as a matter of fact, found to surrender themselves unreservedly to all sorts of sinful indulgence".
2 There is no call for despair with respect to the future of the Church; there is only uncertainty as to when She will resume her spiritual suzerainty in Western civilization and its outlying former colonies.
Catholicism and Islam have coexisted as religions within their respective civilizational sectors, but as civilizations they have proven largely incompatible and remain distinct for that reason.
As Islam strengthens in resolve, both religious and civilizational, Christianity
2 http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view. php?id=3797
weakens. The once decidedly Christian nations, particularly those of Europe, have fallen prey to the would-be global management coalition run from the counting houses controlled by the secular humanists to the extent that they are willingly opening their borders to unfortunates who nevertheless have little or no interest in adopting the values of their hosts, never mind their now-diluted core religion. Prudence dictates consideration of the possibility that an unassimilable and uncontrolled immigrant invasion of Western nations will include those who could constitute a fifth column in the event of open conflict between the Christian-heartland West and Islam, a possibility to which the Holy Father seems oblivious. Perhaps the recent murderous violence in Europe will attract his attention even if the Fatima prophecies do not.
The decadent West seems determined to continue its drunken stumble into the gloaming while the Church tut-tuts any efforts to present a sober evaluation of societal and civilizational decline.
Nevertheless, one wonders if even if it were still "late afternoon", the West might be stumbling for failure to raise its collective eyes from various electronic gadgets and for once gaze upon reality as it presents itself to the beholder bold enough to see things as they are, not as one dreams they might be.
There will be those who will claim that twilight is really dawn if one only looked at it differently. There will be those who will claim that twilight does not necessarily imply a gathering dark but simply a lessening of light.
There will be those who will claim that night need never come in the secular materialist utopia, but said godless "utopia" is in fact a hall of mirrors that will lose its power to distort reality not in the clear light of day but rather when the light fails and darkness renders the mirrors unable to cast back distorted reflections. One way or another, night will fall. So too could Western civilization fall into what will be a genuine dark age for a night that may last for generations, but not "forever".
The flame of the Faith will never be extinguished; no qualification.
Somewhere in a little oases of light in a benighted West, the lamps will keep on burning generation after generation until dawn breaks. The twilight and the night are only foreshadows of the new day to come. ■
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