Ringing in the new year of 2017, rife with predictions from seers and others on what might happen during this 100th anniversary of the Fatima revelations, has already seen its troubling signs. One thousand or so ‘migrants’ from sub-Saharan Africa tried to storm the border, rushing and fighting their way into southern Spain. They fought with riot police with rocks and clubs, but were turned back. What happens when they return with rifles and grenade launchers? I am not sure there are enough police in all of Europe to fend off the potential millions who may want to ‘seek asylum’ from the dysfunctional societies which their creed has helped to create. We are facing interesting times, and should all meditate on the lessons learned from Charles Martel in 732 at the battle of Tours, Don Juan and Saint Pius V at Lepanto in 1571, and from Jan Sobielski in 1683 at the gates of Vienna. A loss of any one of these battles would have likely turned a large swath of Europe into an Islamic caliphate. Why would such not happen again, and are we as prepared, and as cohesive a society, as they?
Just looking at the drunken revelry in Britain provides a glimpse of an answer: Flabby shirtless men, semi-clad women, boozy and careless, are not the stuff from which a culture is built. I won’t provide a link to preserve what modesty we have left. How Christian is Europe in any real, practical sense of that term? Without Christianity, and by that I mean a spiritually and intellectually strong and vigorous Catholicism, there can be no hope, no foundation, no solidity with which to ‘resist’, if such be the word, perhaps ‘perfect’, ‘elevate’ or, even, ‘evangelize’ other cultures. Or is that now too quaint and unecumenical to consider?
We may include, at the present historical moment, two basic ‘other cultures’, both inimical to Catholicism. Secularism (with its close cousin relativism), and Islam, which at present are sort of allies, at least in Western lands where Islam is still not dominant, but this uneasy alliance will not last for long. Amongst the clearest manifestations of relativism are the LGBT and gender-fluid crowd, who believe there is no objective truth to human sexuality or sex, nor to human nature, and that whatever is your fleeting desire of the present moment, often of the most disordered variety, defines who ‘you’ are. The various forms of Islam, of course, do not believe this, but are sort of quiet for now, again at least in once-Christian lands. They maintain a rather different view of human nature, according the Qur’an: Men are men, and women are women, but not in the sense of Catholicism, nor in a sense fully compatible with Christianity. On New Year’s Eve, another attack, in Istanbul, with a militant gunman in, where else, a nightclub, spraying bullets with an AK-47, killing 39 and wounding dozens more. IS, or ISIS, or whatever the acronym du jour now is, has claimed responsibility:
In continuation of the blessed operations that Islamic State is conducting against the protector of the cross, Turkey, a heroic soldier of the caliphate struck one of the most famous nightclubs where the Christians celebrate their apostate holiday
I would counter that the revelers in the club were likely not celebrating any ‘apostate’ holiday. The end of the Christmas octave? Or is New Year’s now considered a Christian ‘holy day’ in the Islamic world? Perhaps the Islamic attacker was upset that these Christians were celebrating the countdown of the minutes from the date from the birth of Christ, a calendar first formulated by the sixth century Christian monk Dionysius Exiguus. This is contrary to Islam, which a century or so later began counting the calendar from 622, commemorating the Hijra, the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. Yes, perhaps that was it. In the Catholic culture, New Year’s Day is in a far more important sense the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, a day of obligation in the universal Church, and the Church strongly recommends spending an hour in adoration before the blessed sacrament on eve of the solemnity, New Year’s Eve. God rest the souls of the victims, heal all of those wounded, and have mercy on the perpetrator(s).
William Kilpatrick is right: Islam is inconsistent and incompatible with Christian society. It may be compatible with a secular, relativist society, but such a society, once Islam becomes dominant, will not remain secular and relativistic for long. Do the Democrats and Liberals really think Islam will allow them to maintain their most cherished ideals?
But, all in all, Happy New Year, as we hope for the best, even if we expect something less than that. At the very least, the paradoxes and incompatibilities of the various non- or anti-Catholic strains in our society may become more and more evident, leading people perhaps to query, to wonder, to seek, and perhaps even arrive at some sort of truth, maybe even the Truth.