Corpus Christi Blog

“We must rebuild the cathedral… We do not need to invent a new Church” Part I

07-14-2019Weekly ReflectionCardinal Sarah

“As a bishop,” said Cardinal Robert Sarah at a May 25th conference in Paris, “it is my duty to warn the West: behold the flames of barbarism threaten you!”

Allow me first of all to thank Monseigneur Michel Aupetit, Archbishop of Paris, and the curé of Saint FrançoisXavier parish, Fr. Lefèvre-Pontalis, for their fraternal welcome.

I have come to present my latest book: The Day is Now Far Spent. In this book, I analyze the profound crisis of the West, a crisis of faith, a crisis of the Church, of the priesthood, of identity, a crisis of the meaning of man and human life. I discuss this spiritual collapse and all its consequences.

This evening I would like to repeat these convictions I hold so deeply, by putting them into the perspective of a moving visit I made yesterday. Just hours ago I was at the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris. As I entered the gutted church, and contemplated its ruined vaults, I could not help but see in it a symbol of the situation of Western civilization and of the Church in Europe.

It is a sad fact: today the Church seems to be engulfed in flames on all sides. We see her ravaged by a conflagration much more destructive than the one that razed the cathedral of Notre-Dame. What is this fire? We must have the courage to name it, because “to name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world.”

This blaze, this conflagration raging in particular through the Church in Europe, is a case of intellectual, doctrinal, and moral confusion. It is our cowardly refusal to proclaim the truth about God and man and to defend and transmit the moral and ethical values of the Christian tradition. It is our loss of faith and the spirit of faith, a losing sight of the objectivity of faith and thus a loss of the knowledge of God. As John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae:

In seeking the deepest roots of the struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death”… we have to go to the heart of the tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of God and of man, typical of a social and cultural climate dominated by secularism, which, with its ubiquitous tentacles, succeeds at times in putting Christian communities themselves to the test…producing a kind of progressive darkening of the capacity to discern God’s living and saving presence.

Dear friends, the cathedral of Notre-Dame had a spire that was like a finger stretching out toward heaven, pointing us toward God. In the heart of Paris, it spoke to every man about the ultimate meaning of human life.

Indeed this spire symbolized the one and only reason for the Church’s existence: to lead us to God, to point us toward Him. A Church that is not pointed toward God is a Church collapsing, already in the throes of death. The spire of the cathedral of Paris has fallen: and this is no coincidence! Notre-Dame of Paris symbolizes the whole West, buckling and crumbling after turning away from God. It symbolizes the great temptation of Western Christians: no longer turned toward God, turning inward upon themselves, they are perishing.

I am convinced that this civilization is living through its mortal hour. As once during the decline and fall of Rome, so today the elites care for nothing but increasing the luxury of their daily lives, and the people have been anaesthetized by ever more vulgar entertainments.

As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West: behold the flames of barbarism threaten you! And who are these barbarians? The barbarians are those who hate human nature. The barbarians are those who trample the sacred under foot. The barbarians are those who despise and manipulate life and strive for “human enhancement”!

When a country is prepared to let a weak and helpless man die of hunger and thirst, it marches down the paths of barbarism! The whole world watched as France hesitated to feed Vincent Lambert, one of her weakest children. My dear friends, after this, how can your country give the world lessons in/of civilization? When a country arrogates to itself the right of life and death over the smallest and weakest, when a country kills babies in their mother’s womb, it is slouching toward barbarism!

The West is blinded by its lust for wealth! The lure of money that liberalism instills in hearts lulls the peoples to sleep! Meanwhile the silent tragedy of abortion and euthanasia continues. Meanwhile, pornography and gender ideology mutilate and destroy children and adolescents. We have become so used to barbarity, it no longer even surprises us!

Underneath the surface of its fantastic scientific and technological accomplishments and the appearance of prosperity, Western civilization is in a profound state of decadence and ruin! Like Notre-Dame cathedral, it is crumbling. It has lost its reason for being: to show forth and lead others to God. When the spire that crowns the building collapses, is it any wonder that the vaults collapse underneath it?

I want to sound a cry of alarm that is also a cry of love and compassion for Europe and the West: A West that renounces its faith, history, and Christian roots is destined for scorn and death. It no longer resembles a beautiful cathedral founded on faith, but a senseless ruin!

Any human civilization that loses sight of God saps its own foundations. A cathedral proclaims, by its vertical architecture, that we are made for God. On the contrary, man separated from God is reduced to the horizontal dimension.

If God loses his central and primary place, man loses his own proper place, no longer finds his place in creation, in his relations with others. The modern refusal of God imprisons us in a new form of totalitarianism: a relativism that admits no law but the law of profit. We must break the chains that these new totalitarian ideology wants to impose on us! If man refuses and cuts himself off from God, then he is like an immense and majestic river that, cut off from its source, sooner or later dries up and disappears. If man denies God and rejects him, he is like a giant tree that is deprived of its roots: he will die immediately. Nicholas Berdyaev said:

Where there is no God, there is no man: that is what we have learned from experience. Or look at the true nature of Socialism, now that we can see what it really looks like. But a truth that stands out and can be seen no less clearly is that there cannot be religious neutrality or absence of religion: to the religion of the living God is opposed the religion of Satan, facing the faith of Christ there is the faith of Antichrist. The neutral humanist kingdom that wanted to establish itself in an order intermediate between Heaven and Hell is in a state of corruption, and the two gulfs, of height above and of depth beneath, are disclosed. There rears up against the God-Man, not the man of the neutral intermediate kingdom, but the man-god, the man who has put himself in the place of God. The opposed poles of Being and of not-being are manifest and clear.

To refuse God the possibility of entering into all the aspects of human life results in man condemning himself to solitude. He becomes nothing but an isolated individual, without origin or destiny. He is doomed to wander the world like a nomadic barbarian, without knowing that he is the son and heir of a Father who created him in love and calls him to share eternal happiness with him.

Behold modern man: alone, wandering about in a field of ruins. This is what I found yesterday when I visited Notre-Dame in ruins.

The spiritual crisis I describe involves the entire world. But its source is in Europe. Rejection of God was conceived in Western minds. The current spiritual disaster thus has distinctively Western features. In particular, I would like to emphasize the rejection of fatherhood. Our contemporaries are convinced that, in order to be free, one must not depend on anybody. There is a tragic error in this. Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilized man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices.

This understanding of dependence and transmission was deeply etched into the hearts of those who built Notre-Dame. They worked for decades and centuries, for their descendants, in many cases without seeing the end of their work for themselves. They knew they were heirs and wanted to transmit their heritage.

Because he refuses to acknowledge himself as an heir, man is condemned to the hell of liberal globalization in which individual interests confront one another without any law to govern them besides profit at any price.

In this book, however, I want to suggest to Western people that the real cause of this refusal to claim their inheritance and this refusal of fatherhood is the rejection of God. I see, in the depths of Western hearts, a profound refusal of the creative paternity of God. But we receive our nature as man and woman from God. “God created man in his image, in the image of God he created them, man and woman he created them” (Gen 1:27). This is intolerable to modern minds. Gender ideology is the refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some in the West revolt, rebel and fight against God. Opposing their Father and Creator head on, they pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman. They materialize in a radical way their rebellious opposition and revolt against God. Modern philosophy and the modern spirit violently reject and attack the natural law; recall what St. John said: “Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 Jn 3:4). The negation of natural law is the ultimate extreme of the rejection of God, the proclamation of liberty without limits as the absolute value and justification for sin. Gender ideology is a perfect example of this.

The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself. Transhumanism is the ultimate avatar of this movement. Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for Western man. This revolt is spiritual at root. It is the revolt of Satan against the gift of grace.

Fundamentally, I believe that Western man refuses to be saved by God’s mercy. He refuses to receive salvation, wanting to build it for himself. The “fundamental values” promoted by the UN are based on a rejection of God that I compare with the rich young man in the Gospel. God has looked upon the West and has loved it because it has done wonderful things. He invited it to go further, but the West turned back. It preferred the kind of riches that it owed only to itself.

(To be continued next week.)

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