An answer to Pope Francis questions

An answer to Pope Francis questions May 6, 2016

MapofEurope“What has happened to you, the Europe of humanism, the champion of human rights, democracy and freedom? What has happened to you, Europe, the home of poets, philosophers, artists, musicians, and men and women of letters? What has happened to you, Europe, the mother of peoples and nations, the mother of great men and women who upheld, and even sacrificed their lives for, the dignity of their brothers and sisters?”

What has happened, Holy Father? It has happened that one of the forces behind all those things was religion, especially Catholicism and today Catholicism has virtually collapsed in the worldview of many Europeans, also thanks to the “innovations” of many theologians and Catholic thinkers in the last few decades.

In his Orthodoxy Chesterton, really a great Christian, used to say: “Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections.

Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason”. Europe now has a new certainty, the parody of reason, and it is no more nourished by the pain and joy of the authentic Christian spirit, by the voice of tradition, by the claims of her identity. Europe has lost her way and the Catholic Church has preferred to let the once beloved continent wander on her own.


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