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Requiem for Europe? Perhaps, but Not for the Church

In his homily today, Fr. Weber movingly referred to this insight posted at Rorate Caeli:

Bohemian thoughts…
Les pensées meurent lorsque personne ne les pense plus;
elles ne subsistent plus alors qu’en Dieu.

Étienne Gilson
Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne

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Europe is dying. She never really existed, not by herself. Geographically, she was always the far west of a much larger landmass. Her reality, as a cultural unity, was forged by the Church. And her unity unified the whole world: her deeply ingrained missionary zeal converted large parts of the globe and Westernized the remainder.

For centuries, she has lived and acted upon her matricidal desires. How deeply has she hurt the heart of her only mother, the Church!

And it finally dawned upon the daughter that the only act which would truly devastate the heart of her imperishable Mother would be her own self-destruction. Wars upon wars had not sufficed. Europe simply decided not to exist anymore. The different lands will remain inhabited, of course, but the thoughts that made them “Europe” are about to disappear completely.

And the great malaise one feels around the world today is not, as some suggest, the end of the “Pax Americana” and the rise of the “East”. No: it is rather the fact that the source of the European framework within which we all, from Pole to Pole, have existed for centuries is disintegrating before our very eyes. The pill and abortion have accomplished what plague, famine, and wars could not.

The Pope, this remnant of a breed of learned and orthodox European scholars, seems so lonely as he visits the heart of secular Europe! From the disturbances following the Hussite movement to National-Socialism and Communism, few lands have suffered so much from the waves of European self-destruction as the Czech lands. And, amidst all this pain, it remains so sublime to gaze upon the Vicar of Christ as he stands, bearing the undying words of God, over the dying thoughts of this continent-sized graveyard.