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Historical diagnosis
Those of us who live in Nordic-minded environments (in the northern part of Europe) have suffered until recently from the contempt to the ridicule of religiosity, always arguing the fallacy that modern rational man can no longer believe because he finally knows the causes of everything. To this was added the fact that in this way man has freed himself from myths and has established the culture of reason. This illusion has been systematically inculcated from official education, especially in Germany, France, Great Britain, and Austria. Not so in the USA, where the rationalist and materialist conception of life has never managed to permeate the vast majority of deeply believing people until today.
The consequence of trusting only in scientific reasoning, which by means of experiments has launched itself to find the philosopher’s stone of perpetual happiness in a world to be redeemed, based on the erroneous persuasion that man is in himself good, and that therefore it is only a matter of achieving a democratic social pact, in the style of Voltaire or Rousseau, in order to finally be able to establish social harmony forever, guaranteed by democracy and the rule of law. Alongside this, contempt for religion has gradually been encouraged. Already the French Revolution – one example among others – had the declared intention of destroying forever the Catholic Church, which was presented as the origin of all evil. Hitler and Communism tried this in their own way, without success.
The Problem of God’s Separation
But this philosophical-rationalist business model has never worked as it had been excognized in the Jacobin cenacles of the French Revolution. Rather, there was a regrettable cultural retrogradation that led to problems never seen before: the very raw wars of the last two centuries, the phenomenon of atheism and materialism, the political killings in Russia, the liquidation of Jews and unborn children (some 50 million since 1900), and exacerbated eroticism. As the Christian conception of man has become totally blurred, certain atheist elites, who try to move us like puppets, have even proposed freedom of sex without moral barriers, freedom to choose one’s sexual identity and the equation of homosexual marriage with traditional marriage.
The fact that our wonderful world continues to function relatively well is due to the fact that the ‘mainstream’ does not follow what the media and social networks proclaim, but relies on healthy common sense. The sad spectacle of disasters on a personal level is making people all over the world rethink. For example, the dramas caused by drugs, by the destruction of the family, are calling for a protest that translates into a return to religiosity, into a kind of eager search for the lost paradise. Let us see how this manifests itself:
Manifestations of the return to faith
In the Hollywood cinema, in the face of the good shock of Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion’, the hunters of profit have discovered in the audience the great market niche of the spectator’s religious attitude. The first production company to launch a whole wave of pro-religious films was Twenty Century Fox, with a whole series of biographies of saints. The Christian faith is unexpectedly attracting and converting many leaders in society.
Another analogous case is the Italian film ‘Cuori Puri’, where the moral beauty of a young girl’s purity is presented. And this same path is being followed right now by several other films, such as Apparition´’ Apparition’, which delves into Marian apparitions. Of course, all these productions have a few scenes that are not very well done for a Christian well formed in the faith, but the balance is very positive, unlike previous films about Jesus by Pier Paolo Passolini and Martin Scorsese, which allow themselves to be mocked and even blasphemed.
In the theatre too, classics with profound messages of faith are being dusted off again, such as ‘Jedermann’ by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, which has returned to the stage after 100 years at the Salzburg Theatre Festival. The underlying argument is that every man, no matter how much he has lived most of his life with his back to God, in the end returns to him.
Another impressive phenomenon is the return to faith in Russia, where the state itself is concerned with maintaining, restoring and building churches throughout the immense territory of Holy Russia. Against the suspicion of many, that it is all political tactics, it is worth opposing that even in this case, the good that is done produces fruit, just as when a farmer angrily casts the seed into the furrow, it will bring the same fruit as in the case of a blessed sowing. And we cannot fail to mention the rapid spread of the Christian faith in China, where it is estimated that in about 12 years there could be 250 million Christians. Similarly, this is happening, with its ups and downs, throughout Asia and in the Arab countries.
The return to the faith may well mean the turning point of secularization, understood as a direct consequence of the scientific rationalism noted above. The signs of this process are innumerable, already predicted by Pope John Paul II, that in the 21st century there will be a return to God. More signs: YouTube, where there is everything, is having more and more videos about religion, although many of them are presented with sensationalist touches to provoke more visits and more money for the authors of the videos. But what is interesting is the phenomenon itself. It is enough to put in the search engine, for example, God, conversions of Arabs or Jews, supernatural phenomena, prophecies, the end of the world, the devil, Freemasonry etc. etc., for dozens and dozens of videos to appear.
The revulsion of the Arab terrorist attacks
Even to these events we can apply the proverb that there is no evil that does not come from good. The persecution and beheading of Christians act culturally as an awakening shock to consciences, leading to inquiries into one’s religious identity. If they embrace the Koran and want to impose it as it is throughout the world, what is my position in the face of this challenge? The whole West is perplexed and tense, coming out of the shock little by little in search of its own religious identity. It seems that little by little history itself is burying the naive principles of Voltaire and Rousseau, or of German idealistic philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Feuerbach, who are none other than the immediate forerunners of Karl Marx. Western man, precisely because of his civilizing and cultural leadership towards the whole world, must now take responsibility for pointing out a direction of march, he must show how and where one can get out of the dark tunnel of his atheistic materialism. And the way forward is a return to faith.
This collaboration was inspired by an article in the Swiss daily ‘Neue Zuercher Zeitung’ by Martina Laeubli on 31.3.18 in Switzerland.
