Morte d'Arthur

There are more things wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.
For what are men better than sheep or goats, who nourish a blind life within their souls,
if knowing God they lift not hands in prayer, both for themselves and those that call them friend.
( Morte d'Arthur)

How shall Christian Civilization be restored

First we must have a clear understanding of what civilization and faith mean and how they are related.

Faith is from God while civilization is man-made.

Civilization refers to the whole body of beliefs, habits and practices which pervade a particular society, something which is built up slowly over long periods of time, and passed on from generation to generation as something tried and proven in the crucible of history and therefore worthy of preservation.

The Western world has enjoyed the benefits of Catholic civilization for many centuries, even in the Protestant countries where significant remnants of Catholic belief and practice still prevailed though always referred to as Judeao-Christian civilization rather than as simply Catholic.

Steadily and progressively since the Protestant Revolution, the Catholic civilization has been eroded and secularised.

In the Protestant countries, the Catholic people have allowed themselves to become secularised by the prevailing culture instead of trying to Christianise it, as is their duty.

The Catholic, like the secularised Protestant, has domesticated his religious beliefs and practices and has less and less used these beliefs and practices to influence his public behaviour.

He has allowed himself to become atomised, like the Calvinist.

Because of this, most Catholics do not present themselves as true examples of what their Faith stands for and therefore cannot act as the leaven that the Gospel calls all followers of Christ to be.

Incredibly, many Evangelical Protestants while referring to themselves as Christians deny that name to Catholics : Catholics are to be called Catholics, not Christians.

In the reclamation of our Catholic civilization, we must recognise the supreme importance of our families.

Our civilization, to be preserved, must be continually replenished by fresh infusions from the families in each generation.

If the family is allowed to disintegrate or to become secularised, the civilization cannot survive.

Our families are meant to be first the primary school for teaching, by word and example, the Truths and Laws of God as revealed to His Church by Revelation.

As our children get older, this Catholic culture of the home is supposed to be further elaborated, developed and applied in the Catholic School or CCD classes.

Then, when the child has reached adulthood and enters public life and the general culture, he is in a position to influence that culture by applying the principles and values he acquired at home and in his Catholic school or CCD.

However, it is not enough to transmit Catholic doctrine faithfully to the younger generations.

There must also be a comprehensive correct re-statement and propagation of the true history of Catholic Civilization which has been so drastically falsified by the enemies of the Church down through the centuries, to such an extent that later generations became totally unaware of the glories of that civilization.

Such re-statement would show what has been and is being lost and would awaken Catholics, and indeed other Christians, to work mightily towards the Restoration.

If even a fraction of the millions of, at least nominal, Catholics in the U.S. were educated enough to be able to do this, our general culture would be soon rescued from the progressive secularisation that is destroying it.

Part of the prevailing mind-set implies that God doesn’t mind that millions of people in various parts of the world are not members of the Church that Christ founded, that we should accept as ‘normal’ that Catholics should just keep to their present numbers and not be interested in inviting, by our words and example, these other people to come into the fold ‘so that there should be one fold and one shepherd’.

Any Catholic worthy of the name must realise that Christ wants all people to be members of His Church - yes, Jews, Hindus, Moslems, and Christian sects, sincere as many of them are in their present beliefs and practices.

We have to, though in a charitable way, hold that they are, in plain language, wrong and living in error.

“Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature”

“He that heareth you, heareth Me”

“He that believes and is baptised will be saved, and he that believes not will be condemned ”.

The Beginning of the Assault on the Family

Thus was the state of the family until the Protestant Revolution.
In this revolution, which was characterised by rejection of the Catholic Church’s moral and teaching authority, the ideal of consecrated virginity in priestly and conventual life was abandoned, monasticism was destroyed and the Calvinist ethic of atomism was established.
The Church’s authority having been rejected, religious authority now resided only in the family and was centered upon the father of the family - the wife being subservient - and upon the personal, intra-family interpretation of the Scriptures.

The greater social community also was dissolved into it’s individual family parts - the Calvinist, Puritan, patriarchal family became the atomistic ‘community’.
The two most important elements in personal and social life - religious and community authority - were now withdrawn into the interior of the family and domesticised.

Thus, the Protestant division of Western civilization lost it’s communal and social character and became private and domestic while their religion also became private and domestic with little or no influence upon social or business life.
This became a secular culture where religion was kept out of the public sphere and personal values were not expected to affect man’s public dealings and behaviour.

During the 18th century the so-called Industrial Revolution began in England, with the universal acceptance of usury, the invention of the steam engine leading to steam-driven ships and trains and with machines to an increasing extent, supplementing manual labour and greatly augmenting industrial productivity.

The cottage industries, which together with agriculture, had been the mainstay of economic life, gave way to the factory system and industries in large numbers moved from the rural areas to the cities in search of the greater supply of cheap labour.
This new industrial society was totally lacking in the communal spirit and the civic traditions which had marked the ancient and medieval village and city.
It existed merely for the production of wealth and it left all other aspects of life to private initiative.

During all of these radical changes, the strict ethos of the Calvinist, Puritan family continued to rule men’s private and domestic lives but not, to any great extent, their public lives.

We now had this amoral social pursuit of wealth existing side-by side with very strict Puritan personal and family morality which emphasised sexual discipline and hard work for the family’s sake.

As the Calvinist family had cut itself off from the authority of the Catholic Church, it could not be influenced by the Church’s views and Her many pronouncements and encyclicals on the excesses and abuses of the new economic system and so it preferred to remain aloof from public, socio-economic life.

The incompatibilities and contradictions persisted and eventually, under the influence of a pervasive secularism, the natural tendency had to be the gradual abandonment of the Puritan religious and family traditions, the erosion of the old traditions of faithful family life and the loss of the beneficial moral effects on society of this traditional healthy family life.

Divorce was introduced and spread from the affluent to all sections of society and eventually into many Catholic families.
Later no-fault divorce on demand took over.
Next, artificial contraception was introduced and widely accepted.
Next came legalization of abortion.
More recently we see attempts at legalizing homosexuality and even allowing so-called homo-sexual ‘marriage’.

With the decline of the family and the steady reduction of it’s social significance, the State has moved more and more into the vacuum.
Functions which were always regarded as the responsibility and right of the family, are now often taken over by the State, such as one-parent family care, education and health.
One-parent families are subsidized by government and thereby perpetuated.
Income tax systems favour the single and work against the married.
There is no favourable tax treatment of families with more than the socially-acceptable number of children.

Objections to and defiance of the restrictions of family life, which were confined to the males of the citizen class in the ancient and medieval world, are now common to both sexes and all classes.
Many modern women looks upon marriage and especially motherhood as involving the sacrifice of their independence, as an interference with their career ambitions and as a limitation on the realization of their ‘true potential’.
Marriage is still popular because of it’s persistent social prestige and some lingering respect for moral and religious tradition.

The secular forces inimical to the family which introduced divorce, artificial contraception, support for single-parent families, abortion and acceptance of homosexuality, are now advocating spurious forms of ‘homosexual marriage’, in-vitro fertilization, artificial conception, embryo experimentation, euthanasia and other abominations.

We are now at the point where marriage is being regarded as an unnecessary restraint on the hedonistic desires of people who have lost all unselfish love for others and who think primarily of the satisfaction of their own desires.

Males are now able to indulge in unrestrained sexual activity in which procreation is prevented by socially-approved methods, in which any accidental ‘product of intercourse’ can be destroyed - again by socially-approved methods - allowing the male of the species to walk away with nary a thought for any consequences or responsibilities.

These processes must inevitably, if left unchecked, lead to a social decadence far more rapid and more universal than those which brought about the end of ancient civilizations.

We have lost much of the spiritual component of the civilization tripod.

The barbarians are not at the gates but are within the City and are tearing civilization up by it’s roots and are doing so deliberately and maliciously while we, by our apathy and complacency, are helping them.

They are using as battering rams, spurious rights and ‘victim’ status of different kinds - Aids, poverty, racial discrimination and ‘patriarchal oppression’ - to achieve their objectives.

The Christian family must survive and flourish if our civilization is to survive.

It’s as simple - and as difficult - as that.

The Christian Family

Such was the state of decay in the Roman Empire that had followed the abandonment of the traditional patriarchal society based upon the family when the Catholic Church appeared on the scene

The Catholic Church reconstituted Western Civilization and reconstituted the family on a new basis.

The Catholic ideal of the family owes much to the patriarchal tradition which found it’s complete expression in the Old Testament.

It now became a new creation, a patriarchal system sanctified and modified by a sacrament.

The prior patriarchal family was essentially aristocratic, the privilege of a ruling or patrician class while the Catholic family was common to every class, even to slaves.

In the Catholic family the husband belongs as exclusively to the wife as the wife to the husband and this made marriage a more personal and individual relationship than it had been under the pre-Catholic patriarchal system.

The ideal of marital love now became an unselfish one where each spouse devoted him/her self to the welfare of the other rather than to oneself.

The family became an autonomous and self-contained unit which did not depend upon any outside power.

It was regarded as the primary and independent unit of society, possessing it’s own inalienable rights secondary to it’s duties.

This type of monogamous, sacramental and indissoluble marriage has been the necessary foundation of European society and Western civilization for two thousand years.

Women have always had a wider share in social life and a greater influence on European civilization than was ever the case in prior civilizations -Hellenic, Roman or Oriental.

In Catholic civilization, the patriarchal ideal was balanced by the ideal of virginity and the family did not control the whole existence of it’s members.

The spiritual side of life belonged to a spiritual society in which spiritual authority belonged to a consecrated celibate class - the clergy - who by their acceptance of chastity showed how the sexual instincts could be sinlessly controlled and disciplined.

This transcending of sexuality enabled husband and wife to live together in fidelity and trust.

Evolution of the Family

The family is not the product of civilization but is civilization’s starting point.

The sexual instinct and the parental instinct are not exclusively human.

These instincts exist equally throughout the animal kingdom.

They contribute to civilization only when they are controlled and disciplined, i.e. when their purely biological functions are transcended by the attainment of a permanent social relationship.

Lewis Morgan elaborated the theory of the gradual evolution of the family from conditions of primitive sexual promiscuity through various forms of group marriage and temporary pairing-up, to the higher forms of patriarchal and monogamous marriage.

This theory was never widely accepted by the scientific community and modern anthropology wholly discredits it and emphasises the universality of marriage in all generations and everywhere.

Whether the social structure was matrilinear or patrilinear, it was the universal rule of every known society that a woman, before she bears a child, must be committed to an individual male partner.

In all human societies moral tradition and law decreed that a group consisting of a mother and her offspring, without a father, was not a sociologically-complete unit.

Marriage is society’s approbation of the biological functions where the instinctive activities of sex and parenthood are socialised and where man is no longer free to follow his own sexual instincts but is forced to conform to an approved social pattern.

Even in the most primitive societies sexual relations were regulated by a complex system of restrictions where any breach was regarded not only as an offense against tribal law but also was regarded as morally sinful - recognised as contrary to the Natural Law which applied always and everywhere since the beginning of the world.

Bear in mind that all primitive cultures involved the widely dispersed descendants of civilised Noah’s sons who, after the linguistic confusion of the Tower of Babel, were forced to separate in language-groups and to go to areas far away from their initial habitats, often to lose the civilising attributes that the original society possessed and so they become variably primitive.

Civilization depends upon a tripod of spiritual, intellectual and technological attributes and the commonest cause of degeneration of a civilization is the loss of the spiritual element with it’s spiritual values, which acts as a glue to hold it together.

Human civilization is not instinctive but instead has to be achieved by struggle involving direction, regulation and control of the natural instincts , appetites, desires and actions and the subordination of these instincts, appetites, desires and actions to the common good.

History has shown us that the civilizations that demanded greater moral effort and stricter social discipline also showed greater cultural achievements and longevity.

For example, in the matrilinear societies and families of ancient times, where the moral discipline demanded less repression of instincts than the patrilinear society, cultural achievement was less impressive and the society was less flexible in adapting to altered circumstances.

The patriarchal society and family required chastity and self-sacrifice on behalf of the wife, obedience and discipline on the part of the children and acceptance of a heavy burden of responsibility by the father who was expected to submit his personal feelings and urges to the interests of the family.

This patriarchal family was a much more efficient unit of cultural life, was not limited to sexual and reproductive functions and became the source of social continuity because of it’s stability and it even acquired a religious character inasmuch as the father, mother and children worked towards society’s common good by working towards their family’s common good in an unselfish manner.

The true patriarchal family did establish the father as the head of the family but under this religious influence also it transformed the position of the woman into a more dignified role as an equal co-partner in the enterprise.

Example of matrilinear societies included those which worshipped the Mother Goddess.

This Goddess worship was barbaric with rites usually marked by sexual excess, cruelty and sometimes human sacrifice.

The Goddess was eventually transformed by patriarchal culture into the more gracious forms of Demeter, Persephone and Aphrodite as well as Athene the giver of good counsel and Artemis the guardian of youth.

The patriarchal culture introduced the concepts of piety, chastity, honor and modesty admired by the Greek and Roman philosophers and present in the other civilizations from Europe to China which were all founded upon the traditions of the patriarchal family.

They had the social strength to prevail over the weaker matrilinear civilizations which preceded them.

The Chinese patriarchal civilization was to last for 2,000 years - it is thought to have originated with Noah of the Biblical flood.

The Greek civilization strayed from the patriarchal path and, like the Roman civilization later, tended to favour the man without a family who could devote all his time and effort to the duties and pleasures of serving the State.

Many of these men satisfied their lusts by licentious living and homosexuality in preference to marriage while others would tend to get married later in life and to have small families.

Other anti-social practices such as infanticide and abortion were common.

In the Roman Empire, because of the falling birth-rate and infanticide - pre- and post-natal - the army and other state positions had to be opened up to foreigners and even slaves.

Mutual Influences

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Footprints that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Longfellow

Terri's Case

Terri's case is yet another victory for the Culture of Death.
Throughout all this controversy we have heard a lot about 'what did Terri want'? 'Did she once say that she would not have wanted to be kept alive under these conditions'?
What she might have said doesn't matter. It is not relevent in this case. Nobody can morally consent, either immediately or in an advance directive, to one's own death by means other than natural causes.
When a person is dependant upon a respirator and the respirator is removed, the death that follows is a natural death: the person dies from the disease or accident that made him dependant on the respirator. When a person has a terminal, incurable disease and he or a responsible family member elects for Do Not Resuscitate, the patient dies from natural causes.
In the case of Terri, she has not been in a terminal condition in danger of death and has not been receiving extraordinary medical treatment. Receipt of food and nourishment by a feeding tube is basic patient care and does not constitute extraordinary medical care. With this tube in position Terri has been in a stable state, for over 15 years and with the potential to live for many more years if not interfered with. Terri is dying an imposed death, an unjust death, a judiciously imposed death, a death based on the decrees of a dysfunctional judicial system.
This judicial branch of government has been for some time the dominant branch. It dominates over the executive and legislative branches by use of a veto. This veto is exercised by pronouncing certain executive and legislative acts as un-constitutional, thereby nullifying them.
When we see the areas in which they exercise their vetoes, we are led to suspect an underlying agenda. We are reminded that Pope John Paul has referred to the Western Democracies as essentially entities of Totalitarian Democracy