THE DARK AGES REVISITED?

If there were such a thing as a “time machine”, I wonder what the past would really look like.

For example, what historians now refer to as the “Dark Ages”.  

What was it really like during that period in Europe following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire?

Did the historical Dark Ages look anything like what we are experiencing today in the moral, social and political battles that are being waged and seemingly lost in our modern day society?

Certainly, there is an anti-intellectualism that is running rampant in almost every facet of modern human experience.

The Church itself has not been immune.

Christians are routinely ridiculed and, in some instances, persecuted for their faith.  Priests and religious as well as Christian faithful are dying as they witness to the Gospel and their faith in the Church.

It was largely the Church that rescued Western Civilization from the Dark Ages of the past.

But sadly, in today’s world, the only Catholic certainty now appears to uncertainty itself.

Absolute truths have become completely subjective.  

Moral relativism rules the day.

Church’s teaching on Holy Communion for remarried divorcees varies from country to country and diocese to diocese.  Even supporters of Pope Francis (like me) do not fully understand or apparently cannot agree on what the official Vatican position entails. 

Even the Church’s teaching on suicide now varies in different parts of Canada.  

Recently, the Vatican seems to have accepted the fact that a Belgian Religious Order has pushed things even further, insisting that it intends to actually carry out euthanasia and assisted suicide at its hospitals. 

As for the laity, radical secularization has transformed the Christian faithful into a heartland of moral indifference and relativism.  

For the most part, the laity have been quite content and eager to surrender themselves to what is socially and politically expedient.  Their consequent loss of practical religious faith has impacted every aspect of contemporary living.

Marriage, human sexuality have ceased to have any religious significance or definition.  The family, building block of human society itself, is in a state of ruin.

Christian virtues are the stuff of derision and mockery.

Nor can the faithful look to their Priests for inspiration or support, when the Ministers of the Gospel choose not to proclaim the truths of the Evangelical counsels but offer instead the worthless therapeutic regimen of false and failed psychological babble.

Catholicism is dying in Europe and, as I have often lamented, Western Civilization is dying with it.  We are indeed living in the Dark Ages once again.

But, alas, the Church that rescued civilization from the Dark Ages of the past is no longer the forceful agent for conversion and renewal it proved to be in the Middle Ages.

Where does that leave humanity?

That will be the judgment of generations and historians yet to be born.

In the meantime, the seemingly few of us who remain faithful to the Lord Jesus and His Church need to remain faithful to our Creed and ask the Holy Spirit to fortify our human frailty.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful and inspire in us the fire of Your Love.