Pope Francis Bringing Church, Western Nations Potential Trouble

I will start with my usual clarifying statements that I am a lifelong practicing Catholic that has supported the Church on all (the sinful past indifference to the existence of pedophile priests excepting) of her doctrines, disciplines, and practices.

With the comments Pope Francis made last week that effectively told the world that the Church should not talk about (did he mean ignore?) the societal threats posed by abortion and the radical gay agenda still being quite warm, however, the loquacious Pope commenced to open his mouth yet again. The preceding of course came after his questionable activity of flaunting church practice such as with his flippant choice of garb in his installation in office and washing the feet of a girl in a solemn portion of the Holy Thursday liturgy. This time he not only tells westerners that we have no right to determine who or how many people should be allowed to enter our countries, but he also implied that our concerns about the effects of rampant immigration are irrational.

I would welcome his words if he urged the developed countries to increase their assistance of agricultural development such as irrigation, soil improvement, and drought/disease resistant crops. He could have added that we would do well to improve access to water and provide jobs by building production facilities of any type in underdeveloped nations.

All of these would would be more in line with Christian principles than merely telling people that the right to property, with that of national sovereignty and cultural identity naturally following, essentially mean nothing. It would also be of far more benefit to help them from a position of - of not prosperity, which is fast leaving Western nations, at least of having more than what is necessary; a key acquirement for those who are called upon to help others rather than from a position of forced, mutually-shared ruin.

I respect the call to end what amounts to slavery in many nations, but Pope Francis is taking the position of the Left by having us infer that we have no right or reasons for our concerns.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/24/us-pope-refugees-idUSBRE98N0CT20130924

"Pope Francis urged countries on Tuesday to welcome and respect migrants and refugees and not treat them as "pawns on the chessboard of humanity".

Francis, who has made the defense of the poor and vulnerable a cornerstone of his papacy, said in a message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees that there should be a change in attitude on the part of host countries......

"They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more."...........

Immigration is a divisive issue in Europe and beyond. France's far-right National Front, which has an anti-immigrant policy, has been buoyed by improving poll numbers.

Italy's first black minister, Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Africa, has been the butt of racist comments from the anti-immigrant Northern League because she supports automatic citizenship for immigrant children born in Italy.

The steady flow of refugee boats is a also hot issue in Australia, polarizing voters this month's election.

The pope, whose own ancestors left Italy for Argentina in the early 20th century and lived through the Great Depression, called for "the elimination of prejudices and presuppositions" in the approach to migration.

"Not infrequently, the arrival of migrants, displaced persons, asylum-seekers and refugees gives rise to suspicion and hostility. There is a fear that society will become less secure, that identity and culture will be lost, that competition for jobs will become stiffer and even that criminal activity will increase," he said.......

["Yes, your Holiness, that is correct, but our concerns are not petty, nor are they without cause. They are derived from what we are already experiencing now. These are not irrational fears, they are realizations that everything that you mention is happening as we speak".]

In July, Francis chose Lampedusa, the tiny island off Sicily that has been the first port of safety for untold thousands of migrants crossing by sea from North Africa seeking a better life in Europe, as the place for his first trip outside Rome to draw attention to the plight of refugees.

[The choice of Lampedusa was ironic as he island has been swarmed by migrants for at least two years. These have,  in addition to seriously straining the ability of the Italian government provide for them, have often enraged in violent activity in the refugee centers, including numerous acts of arson]

"A change of attitude towards migrants and refugees is needed on the part of everyone, moving away from attitudes of defensiveness and fear, indifference and marginalization - all typical of a throwaway culture - towards attitudes based on a culture of encounter, the only culture capable of building a better, more just and fraternal world," he said in the message.

Earlier this month, when he visited a refugee center in Rome, Francis said disused church buildings should be used to house asylum-seekers."

[Well, the latter is just a great idea. Why don't we just plaster over the mosaics and frescoes, remove the statuary and stained glass, and just turn them over to Muslims for new Mosques? That's something for which Europe has a pressing need]

I am beginning to come to the belief that Pope Francis has all the makings of a train wreck; not the old-fashioned type mind you, but one that involves high-speed trains.

Pope Francis, even though he hails from Argentina, cannot be unaware of the situations in Western Europe, Australia and the United States. Western Europe is in grave danger of losing what makes it Western Europe - a region populated by peoples whose relatively common culture, history, and even religion* have enabled them to develop along certain lines and create societies that have characteristics unlike those in any other region of the world. The Left-induced deluge of immigrants from  Muslim countries has introduced an intrusive element - one that has a incredibly long history of invading and subjugating Christian-held lands, has brought places like Germany to the point in which (along with mind-boggling amounts of horrific violent crime in all of Western Europe) ethnic Germans children are now a tiny minority in some elementary schools. These new 'minority in the land of the ancestors' children are, in addition to being routinely harassed, commonly called "pork gobblers" by their fellow Muslim students. The US, Canada and other daughter nations of the UK have similar foundations and, while their stations are not yet as drastic as that of Western Europe, these too are in danger of being slowly marginalized to the point of eventual nonexistence.

(*Few realize that the old Mainline Protestation churches have more in common in doctrine and practice with Catholicism than they do with the Evangelical/Fundamentalist brand of Christianity. I have done other posts on that subject. One example-  http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/03/evangelicals-erase-term-easter.html )

It does not take a combined mathematician/anthropologist to understand that a nation or region can only absorb an amount of newcomers from quite different cultures that allows for real integration into the host society. If Vietnam began to allow all Chinese who desired to live in that country to enter unchecked, in time that nation would be far more sinicized than it was in the late middle ages-early modern era from Chinese influence/political domination. Keep that pace up and eventually Vietnam itself becomes a name that has virtually no meaning. 

Pope Francis, with all of his (possibly - we'll have to make a decision on that when we have more evidence), good intentions, seems to ignore that the very culture of Western Europe was an appreciable factor in making  the Catholic Church what it is today. Sure, Kata and Holos, (Koine?) Greek for "thorough and whole" means "universal", but to take the term universal and knowingly gloss over the fact that the Church has elements that simply would not exist had it not been given all the breathing space that it had (snug in the bosom of the Western world) is to play the same game as a Marxist. The latter starts off with the presumption that certain periods are needed for development of a society and that, once it reaches a certain point, it can be maintained forever while casting off all of the elements that came together to create that society. "Year Zero" is the aim of Marxists - the determination that everything that occurred before the here and now has no purpose and must be discarded.  

While the Western Church was protected by the civil arm of Western Europe, the nations of the Eastern churches bore the brunt of the frontier fight (acting also as a buffer for the West) and ultimately succumbed to Islamic domination (excepting the Russians who had the Mongols) . These societies have never fully recovered from those centuries of oppression and despoliation . Western Europeans, after a lot of fits and starts, were able to check the Islamic advance in the Iberian peninsula, Sicily, and other Muslim-held regions and in time retake them. It was in this climate that the Western Church, born of a religion coming from Judaism and with contributions of Greek thought, was preserved and able to prosper. Politically too the Western Church owes to Western hisyory her independence from the state. The situation in Western Europe, having no permanent presence of a central political power in Italy, enabled the Western Church to assert herself in a manner that would be utterly foreign to the Patriarchs of the Eastern churches, who were quite subordinate to the Emperor in Constantinople. 

Pope Francis would do far better to work to bring about, as did his predecessor, a new evangelization to Western Europe - one that allows Western Europeans and Western nations to return to the common Christian roots. Such a move would be followed by calls for true charity - the type that helps people without submerging the societies that provided the environment in which the Church forged much of her identity.   

How about the wealth of the Church? Well, he could see the treasures sold off at auction, which would bring enough money to feed the poor in Bangladesh (Which could use some petrodollar help from the Gulf States) for maybe a year. Then what?

The European "far-right" noted in the article has been pushed into its own corner by complicity with the Left of  the Catholic and Protestant churches of Western Europe. With their Churches ignoring the most crucial aspects of Christianity - mans' fall, sin and the redemptive work of Christ, and the pretending that the Churches' protector - the Western world, is no longer needed, patriotic Europeans are trying to reclaim their heritage and societies while living in a state of atheism, rabid secularism, or even a reversion to the old European paganism (Thule Society and such). Just as the Church would be utterly different without Western Europe, so too would be Western Europe without the influence of the Church. This is patently obvious, as is the understanding  that a prosperous and strong Western Europe would never have come to be in a climate of competing pagans adhering to the old ways of cattle raiding and blood-feud. But alone these people are, ignored by the Church.

The loss of this symbiotic relationship is almost never discussed.   

I strongly recommend  consideration be given to reading Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints. Having three children of half-Korean ancestry, I had to push my way through some of the attitudes of the third -person narration, but the overall message is too important to ignore - The peoples of Western Europe and the nations that developed largely from its progeny are in a state of paralysis of guilt and fear of being labeled as racist. A failure to address these fears could easily result in the end of the West an an identifiable entity, and the Western Church along with it. Submerged the cultural identity of Western peoples enough and the result will be a Socialist world that has no need for a Church that gave up concentrating on preaching the message of sin and redemption to focus almost solely on Social Justice. 

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/08/illegals-turning-us-into-camp-of-saints.html


The following two posts concern my proposal for American Catholics to deal with the political  intrusion of the Church on our society, but it would work for Western Europe as well. The full post is in the Gates of Vienna link with some excerpts in the link below.

http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/09/the-secession-of-a-pleb/#more-30465

http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2013/09/catholic-proposes-strike-against.html