Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”.

JRR Tolkien

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Cardinal Francis Eugene George (2010)

Read “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley and “Love in the Ruins” by Walker Percy

If things keep drifting in the direction in which they are rapidly drifting now, Catholics and other Christians and Jews who adhere to the traditional Judeo-Christian moral teaching are going to be marginalized, then persecuted. I foresee a day when the tax-exempt status of the Roman Catholic Church will be yanked because it resolutely refuses to ordain women, because it condemns abortion as murder, and because it refuses to condone sex outside a marriage open to procreation. I foresee a day when priests will be fined or imprisoned for articulating in sermons and counseling sessions the teaching of the Church. I foresee a day when similar punishment will be visited on Protestants and Jews who assert the traditional teaching of their faiths. This is, after all, the sort of thing that happens in Canada now. How can one tolerate those who deny others’ rights?

As those of you who have read what I have had to say on related subjects in the past already know, I believe that, by soft-pedaling its opposition to abortion and by enthusiastically embracing the administrative entitlements state, the American Catholic Church has asked for the treatment now in store for it. But the folly of the Catholic hierarchy in this country and the corruption that beset it in the all too recent past does nothing to obviate the horror of what is to come. What is happening at GW is a straw in the wind.

Religious Liberty at George Washington University?

Historically, those who live the simplified and shared life and invite others to do so, for love of God, bring about the Kingdom; they create heaven on earth and humanity is enlarged. Within that same history, those who try to force the communal ideal through law and compulsion bring about the gulag; they create hell on earth and humanity is demeaned.

Acts 4:32: Christian Commonality Ends Where Compulsion Begins

Ozymandias

Unfortunately, it seems that the future Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932, in Brave New World, is arriving early. Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. However, we do need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT) and to prosecute politicians and staff and their “family and friends” who profit from insider trading.