VATICAN, December 20, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– In his traditional Christmas greeting to Vatican officials this morning, the
Pope drew a link between the times of the fall of the Roman Empire and our own
times, arguing that “the future of the world is at stake.”
Read the pope’s complete talk
here.
Describing the decline of the Roman Empire he said, “The disintegration of
the key principles of law and of the fundamental moral attitudes underpinning
them burst open the dams which until that time had protected peaceful
coexistence among peoples.
“The sun was setting over an entire world,” he continued. “Frequent natural
disasters further increased this sense of insecurity. There was no power in
sight that could put a stop to this decline.“
Comparing those times to our own he said: “For all its new hopes and
possibilities, our world is at the same time troubled by the sense that moral
consensus is collapsing, consensus without which juridical and political
structures cannot function. Consequently the forces mobilized for the defence of
such structures seem doomed to failure.”
The pope tied the priestly sexual abuse crisis, which he referred to as “the
great tribulations to which we have been exposed during the past year,” into the
overall theme of the talk.
He began by pointing out that the past year had been designated the “Year of
the Priests.” “We were all the more dismayed, then, when in this year of all
years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of
minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis, and
under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their
childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime,’” he said.
While he spoke of the need for the Church to reflect upon its own inner
workings to determine how such a thing could have happened, he also pointed to
the moral disintegration of society as a contributing cause. We cannot, he said,
“remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have
come to light.”
In this context the Pope noted child pornography, sex trafficking and drug
abuse, saying that, “No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving
intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in
the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s
freedom and ultimately destroys it.”
The Pope stated that in order to resist these evils it is necessary to resist
relativism, and the warping of the idea of the conscience:
In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their
ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as
something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This,
however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It
was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is
no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better
than” and a “worse than”. Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything
depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or
also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by
a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The
effects of such theories are evident today.
He also called on political leaders to “put a stop to Christianophobia,” and
noted that “healing can only come from deep faith in God’s reconciling love.”
In the final analysis, he suggested that “only if there is … a
consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function.” The Pope
explained that the public agreement on essential truths which is “derived from
the Christian heritage” is at risk from an approach where morality is ignored in
the pursuit of certain goals.
He concluded: “To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity
for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and
what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will.
The very future of the world is at stake.”
********
Prophetic
warnings of Pope John Paul II:
The Tyrant State
"Once a country
has given itself over to all manner of paganism and sin, it is not long before
that country falls into a system of dictatorship, bringing great sorrow, even
murder to the masses." - Jesus, May 26, 1979
The following
excerpt is from Pope John Paul II's encyclical, The Gospel of Life:
There is an even more profound aspect which
needs to be emphasized: freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a
factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and
respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a
desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts
out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which
is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no
longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own
choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable
opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.
This view of freedom leads to a serious
distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood
in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting
one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend
oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but
without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of
the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail. Still, in the
face of other people's analogous interests, some kind of compromise must be
found, if one wants a society in which the maximum possible freedom is
guaranteed to each individual. In this way, any reference to common values and
to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on
to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is
negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the
fundamental rights, the right to life.
This is what is happening also at the level of
politics and government: the original and inalienable right to life is
questioned or denied on the basis of a parliamentary vote or the will of one
part of the people—even
if it is the majority. This is the sinister result of a relativism which
reigns unopposed: the "right" ceases to be such, because it is no longer
firmly founded on the inviolable dignity of the person, but is made subject to
the will of the stronger part. In this way democracy, contradicting its own
principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism. The State is
no longer the "common home" where all can live together on the basis of
principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State,
which arrogates to itself the right to dispose of the life of the weakest and
most defenseless members, from the unborn child to the elderly, in the name of
a public interest which is really nothing but the interest of one part. The
appearance of the strictest respect for legality is maintained, at least when
the laws permitting abortion and euthanasia are the result of a ballot in
accordance with what are generally seen as the rules of democracy. Really,
what we have here is only the tragic caricature of legality; the democratic
ideal, which is only truly such when it acknowledges and safeguards the
dignity of every human person, is betrayed in its very foundations:
"How is it still possible to speak of the dignity of every human person when
the killing of the weakest and most innocent is permitted? In the name of what
justice is the most unjust of discriminations practiced: some individuals are
held to be deserving of defense and others are denied that dignity?" When this
happens, the process leading to the breakdown of a genuinely human
co-existence and the disintegration of the State itself has already begun.
To claim the right to abortion, infanticide
and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to
human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an
absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true
freedom: "Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to
sin" (Jn 8:34).
- Pope John Paul II, The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), #19-20,
March 25, 1995.
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