Is the Pope a Catholic?
Lebanon today is 60 per cent Muslim. Why would the head of the Catholic Church desire that the former Christendom should become majority Islamised?
When popes go rogue . . .
Advent is here. I have fallen into the custom, this time of year, to post articles — occasionally previously published book chapters — on topics relating to transcendence, which is to say belief in a world beyond this one, and in a creator or generator of earthly existence. In this context, with Christmas in the offing, I have previously avoided anything to do with the politics of religion, or any particular religion, preferring to speak to what I hold is the most fundamental need of the human, underpinning and eclipsing all others: the longing for eternal life and peace and love. We have come through an age in which there have been sustained efforts to suppress this desire in humanity, or at least in Western humanity, for reasons which relate to all the other assaults on Western humanity of recent times.
I hope to publish such an article next week, by way of setting the mood for the coming celebration of the birth of the Lord of History, Jesus, of Heaven and Nazareth. As I write that sentence, it strikes me that I have not spoken here in those terms for quite some time. This is not because anything has altered in my outlook or personal internal desiring, or indeed the focus of that desiring. But there is a difficulty that has arisen in recent years, and which becomes exacerbated with every passing year, and which I find stymies me in my ability, even my preparedness, to speak loudly and clearly on these topics.
The difficulty relates to the fact that, through various periods of my life, my spiritual/religious disposition has chiefly found its outlet through the medium of Catholicism, and now I find this increasingly inadequate, to say nothing of problematic.
I was brought up a Catholic; I strayed briefly into what I have termed agnosticism (a kind of fog of thinking, really — see my 2007 book, Lapsed Agnostic); I reverted in the course of my spiritual awakening as a result of giving up drinking, following which I became more and more intensely involved with Catholic culture and Catholic people, not merely at home in Ireland but in many countries throughout the world.
I have written here previously about my consternation and dismay at the behaviour of the Church, both globally and locally, over the course of the fake pandemic of 2020 and afterwards. I continue to be unable to comprehend, even fully to believe, that the Church founded by Saint Peter in the name of Jesus Christ, could join with the ugliest of globalist forces in seeking to imprison the world’s people and strip them of their rights. I gasp still when I think of the cruelty of that time, and the failure of the Church to speak coherently against it, but instead to capitulate utterly and to close down its churches and chapels and leave people in their loneliness and bereftness when it ought to have been bellowing to High Heaven that this was not a way for democratic governments to behave. My immediate instinct was to stop attending church and to attempt to gather my thoughts and feelings. I hoped the moment would pass quickly, but it did not. If anything, things deteriorated with the advent of the pseudo-vaccines in 2021, a moment in which the entirety of the so-called Christian churches joined in a sustained clamouring for their congregations to accept what was at best an experimental — therefore untested and unknown — substance which is now known (though not to the mainstream public) to be both dangerous and, in some instances lethal. Now, you might say, I am a Catholic-without-portfolio: I never left the Church; the Church left me . . . lying in my own tears.
I had had my difficulties before that with the pope elected in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, known during his papacy as Pope Francis. I had met him briefly at an early stage in his pontificate, when I spoke alongside him on the feast of Pentecost, in St Peter’s Square, in May 2013, and the next morning at breakfast in Domus Sanctae Marthae. At that time, and for some months afterwards, I was quite hopeful about his papacy. Some of his earliest statements seemed to be promising, and he had an appearance of affability and kindness. Then things began to change.
In July 2021, I published here a letter I wrote to Pope Francis in late 2013, seeking to interview him about some of the signals he had been sending out, and ‘the fundamental questions facing Christians in the modern world.’ One of the particular issues I wished to raise was his insistence on sending messages into the world via interviews with an Italian atheist journalist, Eugenio Scalfari, (who has since died — in July 2022), who did not take notes and who, as a consequence of this, had put out multiple attributions to Pope Francis which seemed to deviate from Church teaching on a number of vital matters.
Here is the article, in which that letter is reproduced:
As far as I am aware, the letter never reached the pope’s desk, but it did become more widely known that I had written it. I had already detected a chill in the air following my appearance with the new pope in St Peter’s Square — not, I suspected, on the basis of an objection to him, but of an objection to my being permitted to fraternise with him. For one thing, I was fired as a columnist with The Irish Catholic, for which I had been writing for several years. This decision was presented to me under the fraudulent pretext that the paper was revising its mix of columnists with a view to extending its reach in Northern Ireland. (I afterwards called up one of my colleagues whom I had been told had also been fired, and it was the first she had heard of it.) During the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admired intensely, I had been invited to all parts of Ireland and many parts of the world, to talk about my books about God, transcendence and spiritual imagination. All this ceased more or less abruptly during 2013. In the early months of 2014, I was cancelled also from the secular mainstream media, following a preemptive strike by LGBTPQ goons anticipating a referendum on gay marriage due the following year and anxious to remove any potentially effective rhetorical competition. Having for years functioned as an analyst of spiritual questions, and a defender of many Catholic teachings, I found myself being shot at by both sides. For more than a decade, I had been in considerable demand as a speaker to Catholic groups all over the world, but particularly in Italy, where I was frequently hosted by a movement known as Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation), and suddenly found that I had ceased to be in demand for or welcome at its events. Having spoken at several hundred meetings per year during the pontificate of Pope Benedict, I now found myself cast out of the houses of both Jesus and Caesar.
It did not matter that events were soon to vindicate my attempted intervention. In August 2021, when the saturation propaganda pushing the lethal pseudo-vaccines introduced to address the alleged ‘pandemic’ was beginning to wear thin, Pope Francis led a charge by clerics all over the world in a determined attempt to bully people who had not yet taken the injections into doing so as ‘an act of love’. He praised the work of researchers and scientists in producing ‘safe and effective’ Covid-19 vaccines.
‘Thanks to God’s grace and to the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us from Covid-19,’ he said.
‘Getting vaccinated is a simple yet profound way to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable. No matter how small, love is always grand. Small gestures for a better future.’
This lead was followed by the vast majority of Catholic clerics, who accordingly led their flocks into the gravest of harm’s way.
And this was not some isolated initiative in the heat of a moment, born of misunderstanding or ignorance: A month later the pope told journalists aboard the papal plane of his incomprehension as to why some cardinals in the Church were hesitant to get the Covid-19 ‘jab’. He even took the opportunity to have a dig at Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has questioned the efficacy, safety and ethicality of the Covid ‘vaccines’ and afterwards had (allegedly) been diagnosed with Covid-19.
‘Even in the College of Cardinals,’ the pope crowed, ‘there are some vaccine negationists. But one of them, poor thing, has been hospitalised with the virus. These are the ironies of life.’
What the pope did not say is that the PCR test in use for ‘diagnosing’ Covid-19 was wholly unsuited to that purpose, with the result that no such ‘diagnosis’ had the slightest basis in science or reality. Cardinal Burke may well have had a cold or influenza. He did not have ‘Covid’.
Four months later, in January 2022, Bergoglio went even further, suggesting that getting vaccinated against the ‘coronavirus’ was a ‘moral obligation’ and denouncing the way people had been, as he claimed, ‘swayed by baseless information’ to refuse ‘one of the most effective measures to save lives.’
‘Frequently,’ he added, ‘people let themselves be influenced by the ideology of the moment, often bolstered by baseless information or poorly documented facts.
‘Vaccines are not a magical means of healing, yet surely they represent, in addition to other treatments that need to be developed, the most reasonable solution for the prevention of the disease.’
From this and multiple other responses and interventions, it became clear that Bergoglio was, above all, an ideologue who saw the pushing of ‘liberal’, pro-authority messages as among his most vital functions. On closer examination, it became clear that he functioned neither as a pastor nor a theologian, but as an agitator for globalist projects, and seemed above all to be on the side of the dark forces seeking to subdue humanity and place it in a digital prison.
He also hated traditional Catholicism (a functioning tautology) with what often sounded like a profound neurosis. Hearing people talk of ‘the Christian roots of Europe’, he once proclaimed, ‘I sometimes dread the tone, which can seem triumphalist or even vengeful.’ He refused to condemn Islamic violence and equated Islamist jihadists with traditionalist Catholics. He was utterly opposed to Church leaders, like Cardinal Robert Sarah, a black African from Guinea, who spoke (and still speaks) of an Islamic invasion of Europe. He talked almost non-stop about ‘ecumenism’ but often seemed to despise the faith he was supposed to be leading.
Following the death of Bergoglio earlier this year, there was a renewed hope that his successor might offer a reversion to more traditionalist and rational forms of thinking.
Initially, the word was bad. The first American pope was not known for his fondness for tradition. He was one of 108 cardinals appointed by Bergoglio in order to stack the college of cardinals with ‘progressives’. He had remained a stalwart Francis loyalist over the previous dozen years. He had proposed taking confessions on the phone during the Covid episode. He was reportedly pro-LGBT and had an abysmal record of dealing with clerical abuse cases. He was also pro-mass migration and known to be hostile to the Trump/Vance administration. He was the favoured candidate of Fr James Martin and Cardinal Blasé Cupich of Chicago. He was Bergoglio 2.0.
A short time before his elevation, in the course of a social media spat between a left-wing podcaster and American Vice President J.D. Vance, on the subject of immigration, the then Cardinal Robert Prevost reposted an article entitled ‘J.D. Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others’, written by a woman called Kat Armas, who purported to rebut Vance’s argument that Catholics should ‘love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.’ Armas wrote: ‘the problem with this hierarchy is that it feeds the myth that some people are more deserving of our care than others’, which by retweeting it, the soon to be elected Pope Leo XIV appeared to endorse. This argument is self-evidently nonsense, for how on Earth could it be argued that fathers and mothers have a greater responsibility to strangers than to their own children?
‘If this is the kind of guff we can expect from the new pope,’ I wrote at the time, ‘we had better fasten our safety belts.’
And I continued:
This is the heart of the poison of Bergoglioism: the (alleged) last pope was, first and foremost, ostensibly a sower of confusion, but in reality he was much worse. He campaigned against Trump on the Mexican border during the 2016 election, talking about bridges rather than walls, and then went back to the Vatican, which is surrounded by high walls. Through his infantile promotion of open borders, he became less a spiritual leader and more a cynical globalist who functioned more as a politician than a cleric.
The election of an American pope will not have been surprising to anyone who understood that the CIA had been intimately involved in the selection and appointment of Bergoglio. According to the American writer and historian Mike McCormick — a former White House stenographer and Biden insider and the author of An Almost Insurmountable Evil: How Obama’s Deep State Defiled the Catholic Church and Executed the Wuhan Plandemic — the CIA (Deep State) and the World Economic Forum orchestrated campaigns and plotted for the election of Bergoglio as pope, using the lifelong ephebophile, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, as bagman to undermine Pope Benedict XVI and set things up for Bergoglio. The chief objective was to promote mass illegal migration, but also to cause chaos by means of demoralisation by promoting Woke craziness and belittling traditionalist, orthodox and entrenched values.
Still, for a moment, we allowed for the possibility that Pope Leo XVI might yet represent a return to reason.
A week after his election, I wrote:
The mystery of Pope Leo XIV has deepened in the days since his election. Accounts of his personality and outlooks are self-contradictory. Some observers are describing him as a conservative who camouflaged himself as a progressive in the Francis years; others say he is a progressive who pretended to be a conservative in the Benedict years. It is as though he has lived his whole life as a dark horse. Certainly, he seems not to be Francis II, or he would surely have chosen that name.
[T]his is not about ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’ but about timelessness and truth. The ‘modern’ world, or at least Western civilisation (the same thing, whether you like it or not) is on the brink of the abyss, and the papacy of Francis did as much as conceivable to push it over. Leo needs to do more than protect the institution he has been chosen to lead. He needs to take us back to a time when the term ‘traditional Catholicism’ was a tautology, and spell out some raw truths to the world and its leaders about the dire direction things have taken.
Yesterday, I awoke with something nagging me from the back of my mind about Pope Leo XIII, from whom the new pope has reportedly taken his name. I am not a historian of the papacy, by any means, but I seem to remember something of interest that I briefly delved into, maybe a good few years ago. A search of my emails reveals that, a dozen years ago, just before the ‘retirement’ of Pope Benedict XVI, I was asked to write a chapter for a book to mark the canonisation of Pope John Paul II, on the subject of his 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), which was itself written to mark the 90th anniversary of the most famous encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, titled Rerum Novarum (‘New Things’), published in 1891, and subtitled ‘Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour’.
Building on the work of Thomas Aquinas, and coming just eight years after the death of Karl Marx, it amounted to a searing critique of socialist ideas, and a call for the abolition of the dichotomous relationship between capital and labour — ‘class against class’ — setting out not just the duties of the holders of capital but also those of workers in a total exposition of the Thomist notion of justice as ‘giving to each what is owed’ — essentially asserting the unique dignity of each human being as a creature made in the image of God. More broadly, Leo XIII sought a middle-way between Marxism and what would later be called neoliberalism. Rerum Novarum became the foundational document of not only modern Catholic teaching but also the tradition of human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which arrived more than a half-century later, in 1948. The encyclical sets out much of what we nowadays find in our constitutions under headings like ‘Fundamental Rights’ and ‘Personal Rights’ — such as the right to private property; the right to family autonomy; the rights of fathers (oops! that one got lost!), and the first known reference to the principle of subsidiarity, whereby power must be exercised in each situation at the lowest possible level. These became some of the core guiding principles of the age that followed, surviving intact until they were ransacked by rogue governments in the spring of 2020.
Things seemed to be looking up a little. Things improved further when it emerged that Pope Leo had chosen his name on precisely those terms and intended to make the threat to humanity of the AI revolution the central focus of his papacy.
A few months later, in October, a red flag popped up when the new pope seemed to engage in the same kind of equivocation as his predecessor, stating that ‘[s]omeone who says “I’m against abortion but I’m in favour of the death penalty” is not really pro-life,’ and ‘[s]omeone who says that “I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,” I don’t know if that’s pro-life.’
I wrote:
[O]ne of the implications of what he says is that to follow the Church’s teaching almost from the beginning, via St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, is in this modern moment hypocritical. This was a trick used recurrently by his predecessor, seeking to shame tradition-minded Catholics whom he clearly despised, for their adherence to the letter of Church teaching through the ages. Worse than that, his response was, all but literally, manna from Heaven for those seeking to promote and justify abortion, and those many nominal Catholics who try to pretend that abortion is not, in fact, murder. For the import of what he is saying is that, in a country where the death penalty is on the statute books, no one is entitled to lay claim to being ‘pro-life’ unless they also work night and day to abolish the death penalty. I have serious reservations about the death penalty, but I do not believe that it is necessary to oppose it in the same way that it is necessary to oppose the slaughter of the most innocent human beings of all. This is one of the reasons I never describe myself as ‘pro-life’, preferring the term ‘pro-baby’. Taylor Marshall is correct, I believe, in asserting that ‘equating the murder of unborn children with the execution of capital criminals is disgusting and contrary to the Catholic Faith’.
Once again, it is clear, we have ourselves an ideological pope, who seeks to manipulate the meanings of Christian teaching in ways that serve the interests of those who have been undermining the one true charism of the Catholic Church, from within and without, for many years. Back in April, when he was elected, I reserved my position, but now it seems that he has announced himself in his true colours.
And so it has come to pass. On his recent ‘interfaith’ tour in Turkey and Lebanon, the pope was asked if Islam represents a threat to the Christian identity of the West.
He responded, disgracefully: ‘These fears are created by people against immigration. We should be less fearful.’
This response indicated either a gruesome degree of ignorance about what has been happening right across the former Christendom, or a connivance with that process of destroying the West by flooding it with invaders who hold to entirely different values than those the pope himself is supposed to defend. To ignore the wanton assaults on Christmas markets across the continent, the murder and sometime beheadings of priests, the almost daily sabotage and arson attacks on churches, the rapes of thousands of Christian women, is to deny reality and accuse the innocent of being bad Christians.
On this tour the pope was also reported as saying that Lebanon should be the model for Europe and America. Lebanon, a onetime 80 per cent Christian country, has become a third-world basket-case country in which that longtime Christian majority, believing itself immortal, invited the Islamic world in to share resources and power with the natives; but, once eroded to a minority by breeding jihad, found that its ‘tolerance’ was not being reciprocated, but instead, as in other European countries, that its Christian people were under siege from the aliens they had welcomed and on account of whose attitudes and conduct they now lived in fear for their lives. Lebanon is indeed the ’future’ of Europe and American — if these continents continue on the paths they have followed in recent years — and these are paths to cultural, spiritual and existential subjugation. This ‘future’ is more correctly describable as ‘no future’.
Lebanon today is 60 per cent Muslim. Why would the head of the Catholic Church desire that the former Christendom should become majority Islamised? Since he refuses to say anything to refute it, Catholics are entitled to assume that this is his position. If he disputes the assertion that this outcome is not merely possible, but relatively imminent, he is in denial, and is equally dangerous.
Both Bergoglio and his successor have upbraided Westerners for desiring borders, yet both have lived as popes behind high walls, protected by border guards. Both have in their turn declined to address the fact that the Vatican makes enormous amounts of money — in the high billions every year — from transporting aliens into Europe and America, many of them Muslims who come to any new country with the intention of delivering it to Allah. In every Western country, agencies of the Catholic Church make vast amounts of fake money through government contracts, laundered via NGOs, by resettling migrants, often to the great detriment of indigenous populations, many of whom languish on housing lists while the newcomers live in luxury.
Is it possible that, in uttering monstrous absurdities about how Europe and America ought to see their futures, Pope Leo is merely seeking to protect the business interests of the corporation he heads up?
A French academic and writer, Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who is one of Europe’s foremost experts on the Muslim Brotherhood — and who requires police protection since the publication of her 2023 book Kalifat nach Plan. Frérism and its Networks in Europe — wrote in that book that the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is ‘not to adapt Islam to Europe but to adapt Europe to Islam.’
The fact that Pope Leo XVI thinks enforced mass plantation is ‘immigration’ tells us he, too, is prepared to use an argument rooted in Christian ‘compassion’ to promote globalist nihilism. I find it hard to get beyond this. It is clear that he is indeed Bergoglio 2.0, just another globalist zombie and — worse — another purveyor of the Dictatorship of Compassion which has been throttling the life out of Western civilisation for several decades, pushing and compelling it towards self-destruction through replacement, invasion, inversion, plantation, and surrender.
In speaking as they have on the topic of mass migration (in reality, mass coercive plantation) both Pope Francis and Pope Leo have misled the Catholic faithful as to the true teaching of the Church on migration, which was laid down many centuries ago by Thomas Aquinas, and remains: that people have no responsibility to absorb into their cultures anyone other than those who are willing to revere that culture, and have an express wish and a reason to be there, and who apply with humility, respect and veneration for membership of that nation. And, yes, Aquinas said, such a person — such a family — may be accepted into a nation — after two to three generations! He also said that no one who expresses hostility to the culture of a nation should ever be admitted to it.
To read in more detail about Saint Thomas's analysis of migration, click here.
The last and present popes, I say without any pleasure, are not holy men; they are fanatical globalists or, at best, limp sock-puppets in the hands of invisible powerful forces with no good intentions towards the human race, and certainly not towards those parts of it residing within the frontiers of what was not long ago known as ‘Western civilisation’, and not long before that by the name of ‘Christendom’.
Of course, to accept the Vatican at face value’s as an altruistic operation, pursuing the spiritual welfare of humanity, would be to engage in a long-rumbled naïveté, since the dogs in the streets now know that for centuries the Vatican has been up to its dog collars in the birth certificate scam which has in effect required the human race to work for corrupt state apparatuses and pay unnecessary tithes which result in lifelong enslavement, when in reality everyone could live abundantly without any necessity for such a system.
Considering the views — and their vehemence — expressed by the two most recent popes, it becomes impossible to avoid that, at its topmost levels, the Catholic Church has become the implacable ally of the gravediggers of Europe and Western civilisation, extolling Islam to the detriment of Christianity and mocking those who regard Christianity as the cornerstone of European civilisation.
There are deeper and murkier aspects of all this, in particular in relation to the continuing controversies about Vatican II and the ensuing unravelling of the doctrines and rituals which has, without doubt, made Catholicism into a thin gruel indeed. To observe the continuing marginalisation and demonisation of ‘traditionalists’ by actors whose devoutness, faith or holiness are very far from self-evident, is more than disturbing. In the context of the damage this is doing to the Christian imagination of the world, and especially in view of the forces now mounted against it, this is as a mad dance on the deck of the Titanic.
Yet, the question of Pope Leo’s actual allegiance — to Christ, to the Catholic faithful, or to the predators seeking to imprison and enslave the human population, reducing their numbers by approximately 90 per cent, and delivering the remnant into a nightmare future governed by an oppressive technological post humanism, is considerably more urgent. The attacks on tradition are not a separate issue, though I do not believe they amount to the more urgent one. Far more so, in my opinion, is the risk that the Church, rather than simply shifting to the ‘liberal’ left, has lurched into the company of the most — literally — diabolical forces on the planet.
We may yet have a chance, before this disaster befalls us, to regroup and make one final attempt to reconnect the human race with the most fundamental considerations of its existence. I was struck by this thought — not for the first time — the other night, when I came across the video posted below, titled ‘The Real Reason Our Culture Is Falling Apart / Stephen Meyer Explains’.
Stephen Meyer is director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. His latest book is Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. He is also the author of the New York Times best-selling book Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the case for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2013), and Signature In The Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (2009). The Center for Science & Culture is the institutional hub ‘for scientists, educators, and inquiring minds who think that nature supplies compelling evidence of intelligent design’. The CSC supports research, sponsors educational programs, defends free speech, and produce articles, books, and multimedia content.
In this video, made earlier this year, Meyer reflects on the 40th anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable 1985 speech, ‘Men Have Forgotten God’.
My central case in this article is that, this time around, the recent popes appear to have forgotten God — and that is why these terrible things are happening in all our countries.
Meyer holds that there are many sobering parallels between the collapse of spiritual life in Soviet Russia and today’s cultural crisis in America like how the rise of materialism, scientific atheism and nihilistic worldviews are contributing to a decline in faith especially among Gen Z.
He summarises quite succinctly the reasons why this may be a moment of renewed opportunity, reminding us that there is a ‘a tremendous change taking place at the higher levels of science and philosophy’.
He instances four factors which stand as evidence of a shift in cultural conditions:
That there is evidence of a supernatural event.
That the material universe has a detectable point of origin.
That the laws of physics and other fundamental metrics are so finely tuned that they make life possible but only just — that outside of these narrow parameters, life as we know it would be impossible. In other words, the universe is fine-tuned to generate life, including human life (also known as the Goldilocks Hypothesis): the idea that, by a slight shift in one direction or another, life would have become impossible.
Due to the discovery of a digital code in DNA, i.e. that DNA resembles a software programme, but at an infinitely more advanced level. (It would, of course, be more correct to say that human achievement in creating software programmes mimics in a feeble way the fundamental structure of reality, i.e. that we have made some minuscule progress in our pathetic attempts to mimic Creation and the Creator. It ought not surprise us that our universe, and its structure, and our own structure as creatures within it, are underpinned by information. This was one of the first things we learned, had we been paying attention in Bible class: In the beginning was the Word.)
Meyer cites the scientific historian, Fredrick Burnham: ‘The idea that God created the universe [is] a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last hundred years.’
He also cites himself as going ‘a little further than that’ in his own work: that ‘the postulation that a transcendent, intelligent and active Creator — the kind of Creator we find in Judeo-Christian scripture, provides the best overall explanation for biological and cosmological origins.’
This is good news after the years of despair-making that we’ve put in over the past generation of neo-atheists and pseudo-rationalists who ignored the granular nature of reality and attempted to prove that man was the highest form of consciousness. Unfortunately, this extended lapse in cultural attention has succeeded in sucking from our cultures the most fundamental basis of our continuance. I do not say that the hypothesis that ‘God is dead’ is itself plausible, but I say that the mechanisms by which the idea of God’s implausibility has spread so pervasively are hidden in our culture, so that this hypothesis has become all but terminally impossible to challenge. God has become ‘unbelievable-in’ — not because things are so, but because our culture has removed from its mainstream the logical tools whereby it might be possible for young people to arrive reasonably at a belief in transcendence, leaving nothing but assertion, and platitude, and white-knuckle insistence that belief in God is valid because we cannot survive without God.
I do not believe that such arguments will carry the day. Also urgently required is a deconstruction of modern culture in order to show how it succeeded in persuading so many human beings of something that is greatly to their own detriment and that of their children: that the notion of a creator was not merely implausible, but actually risible. I believe we cannot survive without God, but I also believe that simply insisting on this is insufficient; we need to show that this view is itself implausible. Old-fashioned ‘faith’ is inadequate in the face of the cultural conditions now confronting the world.
Similarly old-fashioned moralism. One of the things that irritated me about Meyer’s delivery was the way he repeatedly implied that illegitimacy — births out of wedlock — amount to a consequence of atheism on a par with abortion and other social calamities. This is bogus and utterly unhelpful. Illegitimacy is a social issue, not a moral one. It is also the antithesis of abortion: life rather than death. Why is this not obvious? Why does religious culture continue to insist on this nonsense when being born out of wedlock, while not an ideal state, represents, in this aberrant moment of human struggling, perhaps the single most important factor in the continuance of our species, and is something to be thankful for while we set ourselve to working out some real and true answers? Sure, we need to encourage marriage, but while we are still seeking ways to mainstream the new understandings about materialism and transcendence, being born out of wedlock is not the antithesis of marriage — it is second-best.
Here, too, we can observe why simply a return to traditionalism will not save Catholicism. What is needed, in the short term, is a pragmatic approach, one which recognises that the current leader of the largest Christian Church on Earth has gone rogue and needs to be replaced. Meanwhile, we urgently need to host a discussion approximately along the lines as indicated by Stephen Meyer (with, as stated, some important modifications) and thus to tap into the most fundamental, if latent, desires of the human species.
One thing we have learned from the past dozen years of Catholicism is that we cannot rely on ‘religious leaders’ to lead us back to God.