Even Married Christians Are Called to Embrace Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, by Peter Kwasniewski
August 2, 2019Bishop Joseph E. Strickland: Jesus Christ: Teacher and Model of Virtue
August 4, 2019
By Paul Krause, Crisis Magazine, July 31, 2019
Western civilization is weak, exhausted, dying. Our leaders in the Church – servants in attendance to the Great Physician – can now think of nothing to do but preach this thing they call “mercy.” There is nothing wrong with mercy, of course; but when our clerics use the word, they sound more like hospice nurses than the warriors and martyrs who came before them. A Church that consigns herself to be the handmaid of terminal decline abandons her true identity as a fighting church, the ecclesia militans.
It needn’t be this way. While Catholicism flounders in the West, it’s flourishing in Africa and Asia. While Ireland voted to embrace death, Argentina voted to affirm life in its most vulnerable stage. Of course, we should celebrate the health of the Body of Christ wherever it’s found. But none of this diminishes the fact that Catholicism and Western civilization share a close and indissoluble bond.
Catholics should not be ashamed of this extraordinary heritage, nor should the Catholic Church. Catholics shouldn’t be ashamed of asserting that, without Catholicism, the West would no longer be Western in any recognizable form or sense.
What is it that makes the relationship between Catholicism and the West exceptional? ….