A concern for both Catholics and Protestants. The caveat, however, is that the Scriptures speak of a "falling away" in the last time and that God has ordained the paths of nations and the Church. "The church", meaning all believers in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; those basing their salvation on that alone. The Tunnel Dweller
"Christianity has become a minority religion in Europe, the place of its influence: how did this come about and what is the future of Christians in the West? Why are there so few Christians in the West?
” ' For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping), that they are enemies of the cross of Christ; Whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is in their shame; who mind earthly things” (Phil 3:18-19). Do these lines of St. Paul, written two thousand years ago, not apply to our present world? Let us add this question asked by Christ: ” But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8). These words challenge us, when the question of God seems to be of little interest to Westerners, when they are in the minority in believing in God and even less in practicing what the religion of their fathers prescribes for them, even though no one here can ignore the existence of Christianity, even though many people are unaware of what it actually is and what it teaches.
"Many books have been written on the reasons for the de-Christianization of the West, its secularization and the fall in the number of practicing Catholics. External and internal causes are usually put forward. Among the former, we can largely mention the long movement of emancipation of man from his traditional dependencies (God, nature, culture), with the nominalist revolution and the affirmation of sovereign reason from the Renaissance onwards; thus, without denying faith at first, God was progressively put aside. At the personal level on the one hand, the rise of individualism, to the detriment of holism, caused a dissociation between spiritual life, belonging to the private sphere, and public life. [In politics, holism refers to a society where the group, the whole, predominates over the individual, the part.]
"At the political level, on the other hand, a clear separation between the temporal and spiritual orders was established, giving total primacy to the former. With the French Revolution and the disappearance of “Christendom,” the movement accelerated and sometimes took on a strong anti-Christian tone, as in France with the secular laws that led to the 1905 separation. At that moment, God’s sovereignty over the city was largely destroyed—there yet remained to destroy the sovereignty of the natural moral law and the heritage of culture so that the will of man would no longer have any obstacle. We are there today, gender theory and Wokism being the final stages of the deconstruction of the classical anthropology shaped by Christianity.
"On the side of internal causes, by oversimplifying, two types of explanations clash. The “progressives,” who had hoped that the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) would mark a clean break with the past, believe that the decline of Catholicism is due to the Church’s still reactionary positions, positions that are not understood by our contemporaries; they therefore advocate an opening to the world and its demands, especially moral ones (contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, abolition of celibacy for priests and desacralization of the office, ordination of women, etc.). Some “traditionalists” defend the exact opposite point of view: Vatican II caused a rupture in the Church’s Magisterium and in its liturgy, a rupture caused by a rejection of the past and an excessive openness to the world, which manifested itself in a generalized stampede that explains the sharp drop in religious practice and vocations; the remedy would be a “forgetting” of Vatican II and a certain return to the pre-conciliar Church. Between these two somewhat caricatural extremes, there are all kinds of nuances, including those who consider internal causes to be negligible.
"External justifications have certainly played a major role in the decline of Christianity in Europe. As for the internal causes, the “progressive” explanations are far from reality. . . ."
BLM, Eco-harpies, Trans Loons, and Femi-nags Are All Marxists, But Christianity Is the Cure – PJ Media . . ."The leaders of the left-wing fringe groups — referred to as “sleepers” or “sleeper cells” — wait for a triggering event to spring into action. A perfect example would be the death of Saintly George Floyd. (Emphasis mine, TD)
"If the true goal of BLM is to help black people, why would they destroy black communities around the nation? They wouldn’t. The actions of BLM — with the help of Antifa — were focused on two goals: to get rich; and to destroy as much of America as possible. What could be more Marxist than that?....
"A Milwaukee, Wis., thug named Sylville Smith pulled a gun on cops in 2016 and was shot by a black policeman. Race played no part in this incident, yet “protestors” began burning down a black neighborhood in Milwaukee. Smith’s younger sister, unaware that Marxists were behind the violence, urged rioters to go burn down the suburbs where white people lived instead. The Communist News Network (CNN) dutifully edited the tape to try to show the angry little lady as a peacekeeper and not the violent racist she is. The violent Marxists on the ground did their job, as did the sneaky, lying tovarishes at CNN.
