Of Hawking, the Ides and the Demise of the Canadian Family

I am still pondering the providential serendipity of Stephen Hawking’s death yesterday, the math whiz going to meet His God on pi day.  A calculus professor forwarded a reference to the mystical pi number in the Bible, from the First Book of Kings:

And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; … a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference. (1 Kings 7:23)

God knows all about math, having invented it, and He also has a sense of humour, at least from our perspective. But He is also a God of justice, Whose judgements are just.  A priest friend sent me the following quotation from Stephen Hawking, offering a further insight into his views:

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Millions of years? Hmm. I don’t think there were anything resembling ‘men’ a million years ago.  And redemption and human happiness by talking and listening via technology? I also doubt that most conversations on the billions of smart phones now on Earth are all that smart, nor salvific. Rather, I’m with Cardinal Sarah, that we could do with a whole lot less talking, and more silence, so that we can listen to God, whose ‘still, small voice’ speaks in the depths of our conscience, a voice now almost universally drowned out in a technological cacophany.

So unplug for a while, be still, and know that He is God.

Today is also the Ides of March, when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by his fellow senators in 44 B.C., a tragic assassination immortalized by Shakespeare. Et tu, Brute? The death of Caesar marked Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire, a good or bad event, depending on one’s perspective.  My high school Latin teacher (who also taught high school English, and who brooked no sluggards, of whom I was one, alas, although he did his best) always wore a black armband on this day, whether in commemoration of the demise of Julius or the Republic or both, I know not.

Again, God’s providence was at work, for although Caesar’s death led to a brutal civil war, out of that turmoil, Caesar’s adopted nephew, Octavius Augustus, emerged triumphant, sacrificing 300 of the conspirators on one of the anniversaries of Caesar’s demise in atonement to the gods, one of whom was now the deified Julius himself.

On a better note, Augustus also instantiated the Pax Romana, during which the Christ was born, on a still, quiet evening, in Bethlehem, an event unremarked by the world at the time, but which changed all history, and all of us, for all of time, not least the abolition of child sacrifice, at least, until its rediscovery in the modern abortion hecatomb.

We are also in a transition phase here in Canada, from what to what, I know not, but nowhere really good, and certainly not to a Pax Canadiensis, as our own Justin ‘Caesar’ imposes his disordered will and ideology on the populace, including the legally-sanctioned and government-funded sacrifice of unborn children.  As the soothsayer said to Caesar, beware the Ides of March.

For one thing, Trudeau continues his social engineering policies by means of financial coercion: The new rules about parental leave (a financial quagmire funded by the ‘government’, which means the taxpayer, which means continued debt) promote, for want of a stronger verb, fathers taking the same time away as mothers, so that each parent spends equal time at home with the newborn, with apparently little awareness that newborns need their mothers far more than their fathers, for reasons that seemed rather obvious to every previous generation besides ours.

And the Governor of the Bank of Canada, one Stephen Poloz, in a recent speech offered his strident support for ‘universal day care’ which, of course, means the federal government paying other people to raise your children, so in this scenario, both parents are in absentia, with future generations more or less raised by the State, one of socialism’s key and most treasured tenets.

In Poloz’ mind, apparently, this will allow more people to get out into the workforce, so they can help ‘grow’ the economy, and, you guessed it, the government can harvest ever-more tax dollars.  But with Ontario currently draining a billion dollars per month on interest payments alone on the debt, they’re going to need a lot more economic slaves.

But by taking both parents out of the home, will there really be anything resembling ‘homes’, or, for that matter, anything really like ‘families’, except a sort of transient, ersatz version on ever-more harried weekends, hurrying between Ikea, Home Depot and soccer practice, before back to the early commute on Monday, leaving houses barren, empty and bereft most of the week, with the children off at some bureaucratically funded and regulated day care.

Does anyone really think this is working? Or producing happiness? Or fulfilling anyone? Or building cohesive neighbourhoods?

As the family goes, so goes society, said John Paul II.  To return to the Romans, Cato the Elder, statesman, would end each of his letters with Carthago delenda est: Carthage (bitter enemies of Rome) must be destroyed. Whatever the evils of ancient Rome, they held the line at child sacrifice, to which the Carthaginians were addicted. Hence, Cato the Incorruptible’s implacable hatred and promise of destruction, a threat fulfilled by the Roman Legions in the Third Punic War in 149 B.C., with Carthage leveled, and the land sown with salt.

I wonder what Cato, wherever he is now, thinks of Canada?

But I will end by flipping that exhortation on a more positive note:

Familia instauranda est.

The family must be reinstantiated and supported, or we’re all going the way of Carthage.