We're at war
A war has been raging in Ireland for decades now, though most people are barely aware of it. Everyone is involved, one way or another.
It is a war between two radically different visions of life: what it is to be a human being, what the purpose of life is, how we should live as members of a community.
Unlike most wars, however, it is often difficult to tell who is on which side, and many combatants seem to switch from side to side.
Its deepest roots lie in two different understandings of who God is and what our relationship with him is or should be, making it a religious war.
In the 1840s John Henry Newman, an Anglican minister, one of Britain's great thinkers, grasped the key truth about the modern world: ultimately the choice is between Catholicism and atheism. It led him to the Catholic Church.
He saw that there is “no medium in true philosophy between atheism and Catholicism… a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below must embrace either the one or the other,” he wrote.
In today's language, the choice is between State-backed secularist religion and Catholicism. The secularists, in general, know they are at war, who the enemy is and that it must be first restricted and then destroyed.
Their vision is limited to this world, they offer a future without hope, with the pain of despair numbed by a "pro-choice" morality that makes the individual and his or her demands the centre of life.
Catholics, on the other hand, for the most part, flounder around, tuned out, lacking courageous leadership, complacent, unaware they are in a war, unclear what they stand for.
Having absorbed secularist values, they lack conviction about their own beliefs and hope, and are ever ready to surrender in the name of a pseudo-peace.
Since Newman we've had Nietzsche who spelt out for us what the rejection of God meant, and foresaw the atheistic atrocities of the 20th century.
The whole Church has to renew urgently, based on the preaching of repentance and Christian hope. It has to be fearless in proclaiming the gospel and exposing and fighting all that is opposed to salvation.
It is a war between two radically different visions of life: what it is to be a human being, what the purpose of life is, how we should live as members of a community.
Unlike most wars, however, it is often difficult to tell who is on which side, and many combatants seem to switch from side to side.
Its deepest roots lie in two different understandings of who God is and what our relationship with him is or should be, making it a religious war.
In the 1840s John Henry Newman, an Anglican minister, one of Britain's great thinkers, grasped the key truth about the modern world: ultimately the choice is between Catholicism and atheism. It led him to the Catholic Church.
He saw that there is “no medium in true philosophy between atheism and Catholicism… a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below must embrace either the one or the other,” he wrote.
In today's language, the choice is between State-backed secularist religion and Catholicism. The secularists, in general, know they are at war, who the enemy is and that it must be first restricted and then destroyed.
Their vision is limited to this world, they offer a future without hope, with the pain of despair numbed by a "pro-choice" morality that makes the individual and his or her demands the centre of life.
Catholics, on the other hand, for the most part, flounder around, tuned out, lacking courageous leadership, complacent, unaware they are in a war, unclear what they stand for.
Having absorbed secularist values, they lack conviction about their own beliefs and hope, and are ever ready to surrender in the name of a pseudo-peace.
Since Newman we've had Nietzsche who spelt out for us what the rejection of God meant, and foresaw the atheistic atrocities of the 20th century.
The whole Church has to renew urgently, based on the preaching of repentance and Christian hope. It has to be fearless in proclaiming the gospel and exposing and fighting all that is opposed to salvation.