TRANSCRIPT
The nation is descending into darkness at a much faster pace than most people understand. Still, there is a sense — national intuition, if you will — that things are not just not good but, actually, pretty bad.
According to an NBC News poll last week, of Americans who think the country is in serious trouble, a majority of those think the United States is at the start of a long-term decline. When you boil down the math, it’s a hefty portion who now believe America’s best days are behind it.
In short, we are on life support, and our death warrant has been signed — the end of an empire. Of course, these are just people’s opinions. On the other hand, these are a lot of people’s opinions (just about half).
So these findings, coupled with mountains of anecdotal evidence, raise the question, What, then, of the future (especially for those who are young)? And by “young,” we don’t mean infants or juveniles. We mean those 18–30-year-olds upon whom these realities will disproportionately fall.
What we are witnessing is not very different from the collapse of the Roman Empire. For Romans, like Americans, it must have seemed that the entire world revolved around Rome, and, for quite a while, it did.
That skews one’s perception, and, as multiple generations pass and a culture builds up around that perception, it begins to seem like this is just the way things are and have always been — a kind of political and cultural nirvana. Legends are created, statues erected, folklore authored, and, before you know it, you have what seems like it will never end.
And then it does.
It all comes crashing down, owing, predominantly, to fallen human nature; the morals of a society corrupt, the infection sets in and death follows. No one should be really surprised by this. It is the way of all flesh. The only question is when it will all transpire.
For the American empire, that “when” seems to be right now. In the days of Rome, as it collapsed, there was a generation of 20-somethings that beheld it. So too now in the United States. Those 20-something Romans had grown up in a civilization that had been master of the universe; it was dominant, unconquerable, victorious. Everywhere, the gods of Rome ruled supreme.
Those young men had breathed that air their entire childhoods. The thought that 10 years later, all of that would no longer be the case was just unthinkable. It never entered their minds. But then they got into their late teens and 20s and started hearing things, seeing things. Things just weren’t right.
They couldn’t put their fingers on the problem, but they began to realize there was a problem. Something, somewhere, was wrong, different, not right. They heard stories about draining military campaigns, that the empire was no longer expanding, that other nations and civilizations were rising to challenge them — and those other nations were becoming dominant.
The scales were tipping (had, in fact, already tipped), and, one morning, they woke up and the battle was at their door. They were awakened by the sound of barbarians marauding down their streets, assembling for a massive assault just on the edge of town.
What they had vaguely suspected was now visibly present. The empire was done. The life just 10 years earlier they had imagined they would have had now completely evaporated. Gone in just a matter of a few short years — after a thousand years of Roman civilization. Poof.
So what now for the 20-something Romans? Unlike their elders, whose inaction, greed and immorality had helped bring about the collapse, these young men still had a half-century ahead of them. Those responsible would soon be dead, and they would be left to deal with the disaster.
If all this sounds somewhat familiar, it should. It is precisely what the case is right now. What happened then is exactly what needs to happen now. Young men need to realize all this and step up.
But the very important note here is this — the young Roman men who stepped up and raised Western civilization out of the rubble of the Roman Empire were all Catholic. They dismissed the theological heresies and errors of the fourth and fifth centuries and brought forth a Catholic civilization.
They fought valiantly against the barbarian hordes and, eventually, were able to baptize them and fashioned a new culture built on divine truth. Rome, in a certain sense, had to be swept away to make room for the Catholic civilization.
For all its glories and triumphs, ancient Rome was brutal and, ultimately, false — false gods, false morality, false justice. It had cooperated with Jewish leadership to kill the Messiah for political expediency, and, after then turning on the Jews to destroy their capital 40 years later, it had embarked on a savage, centuries-long campaign to destroy the Church.
But, as it was persecuting the Catholic Church, it was also sowing the seeds of its own destruction. This was the air that was being breathed by these young Romans as they watched with their own eyes something their grandfathers would never have believed possible. So they began fighting — at first to somehow secure and preserve an empire that had already passed away but, eventually, for the Church and, in the process, built up a new civilization.
While the same needs to be done now, the challenge today is recognizing the new barbarians and even coming to terms with them. These barbarians have already set up camp behind the lines. These barbarians are ideas — wrong ideas — about man, nature, relationships and God.
The ideas, of course, are promulgated by individuals and organizations and the government, but it is the ideas that need expunging. Since the ideas are all, at their root, anti-Catholic, they are the intellectual equivalent of the physical persecution of the Church by the Roman Empire.
As a sidenote, if they are not challenged and expunged, it will lead to a physical persecution of the Church in the West — but we aren’t quite there yet.
Most of the young have already embraced these barbaric notions, these ideas born of a rejection of Catholic truth — but not all the young. In the coming decades, it will fall to these young, who will grow to full maturity just as their young Roman counterparts did 1,600 years ago, to fight and conquer the barbarians.
At the end of the barbarian invasions, they were baptized. They were baptized by the descendants of those first young Romans, who fought to hold onto civilization and, in the process, created a Catholic civilization.
In the coming years, but beginning now, what must be fought for is Catholic truth — straight up, terrible, glorious Catholic truth. There can be no compromise for short-term political gains. Establishment conservatism has betrayed the cause because it never accepted the fullness of truth, only aspects of it and, even there, for the wrong motives.
The world of politics cannot be abandoned outright because, in our system, that is where all this is fought — but politics can only be the temporary arena of the fight. The political battle is merely to stave off the barbarians on that front. A second front must be opened, a movement or action where Catholic truth is advanced.
Protestantism, for example, for all of the goodwill of so many individual Protestants, must be exposed for its spiritual and intellectual corruption. It was Protestantism that was the doorway for the barbarian ideas that now subjugate the culture.
Protestantism is a heresy — and not just in the realm of theology. Politically, culturally and intellectually, it is a corruption of goodness and that which is right. Adherents to it must be shown that. They must be rescued from it and redirected to truth.
Partial truth is still a full lie and can never be settled on or compromised with — never. So young Catholics with an eye to a political battle must understand that, while that battle is necessary, the final battle is over truth, not just policy.
This is the scene unfolding before us as we witness the collapse of the American empire and what comes in its wake. This is the challenge and, while everyone alive today who loves truth and justice has a duty to fight, it is the young who, more than anyone else, must understand the real war here.
The cry “Christ is King” must ring loud across the land — and that means Catholic truth must be embraced, or an era of very deep darkness will descend on them and their future.