‘Regimes in which God does not count’

This article is making its way around the internet, generated by different messengers but the original message is exceptionally acute and aware and incisive.

Why are old and very often well-known cases being exhumed in 2010 on a daily basis, always attacking the Pope? This is paradoxical if one considers the great severity of then Cardinal Ratzinger and of Benedict XVI on this very theme. The moral entrepreneurs who organise the panic have an agenda which is increasingly clear and which is not essentially the protection of children. This is a time when political, juridical and even electoral decisions in Europe and elsewhere are being made about the abortion pill RU-486, euthanasia, the recognition of same sex unions. Only the voice of the Pope and the Church is being raised to defend life and the family. The reading of certain articles in the media shows that very powerful lobby groups are seeking to silence this voice with the worst possible defamation — and unfortunately an easy one to make — that of favouring or tolerating paedophilia.

This is the centrifugal force driving the attacks. Sunday on a morning news show, veteran journalist Liz Trotta analyzed the media attacks on the Pope and the Catholic Church as a transparent assault by liberal secularists on moral values. Their agenda, she said, is to mainline homosexuality, gay marriage and abortion. And what stands in their way is the Catholic Church, so they are out to discredit and dismantle it.

This is truly a dark hour. It takes one back to the prediction of a great Italian Catholic thinker of the 19th century, Emiliano Avogadro della Motta (1798-1865). He predicted that after the devastation caused by secular ideologies an authentic “demon worship” would spring up which would attack the family and the true concept of marriage. Reestablishing the sociological truth about moral panics over priests and paedophilia will not of itself resolve the problems and will not stop the lobby groups. But it is a small and proper tribute to the greatness of this Pope and to a Church which is wounded and defamed because they will not be silent on the issues of life and the family.