The world, as far as the human eye can see, has always been prey to violent upheavals. Wars, injustices, natural disasters, famines and other catastrophes, natural or provoked, weave the sad history of mankind. However, the world continues to turn: people marry, raise their children, plow their ground, build their homes, all involved in the beautiful occupation of being men, in spite of their weaknesses and the obstacles in life.
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The world, as far as the human eye can see, has always been prey to violent upheavals. Wars, injustices, natural disasters, famines and other catastrophes, natural or provoked, weave the sad history of mankind. However, the world continues to turn: people marry, raise their children, plow their ground, build their homes, all involved in the beautiful occupation of being men, in spite of their weaknesses and the obstacles in life.
It would be unhealthy to fall into an erroneous romanticism that sees the past through a sentimental prism that disfigures it. Since his original fall in the Garden of Eden, man must fight against his bad tendencies, his perverse inclinations and his insatiable appetite for pleasure. Even in the blessed times when Christendom flowered in all its splendor, abortion, adultery, murder and all other manners of sin abounded, as is attested by the interminable columns of pilgrims that crisscrossed Europe doing penance. The perversity of man is not new and it will always be present as long as there are men.
There is, however, a great difference between the past and our own times, marked by the Revolution. In Christendom, the man who abandoned himself to his instincts knew perfectly well that he was following a tortuous path away from God. He might have done this by weakness or knowingly, but he never deceived himself about his sad state and the eternal dangers to which he exposed himself. He did not consider his error to be a good, while we, children of the Revolution, have acquired such a sad and unconscious habit.
The Revolution is characterized primarily by the perverse inversion of order. Msgr. Gaume defined it as "the hatred of any order that has not been established by Man himself, and in which he is not king and god at the same time." It subtly inverts good and evil, making of the latter its ultimate criterion - as is proven by the modern, fashionable moral theories that thrust forth the most shameful perversions into broad daylight, while proclaiming a proud liberation from moral taboos!
In the meantime, those who, after a fashion, try to keep some sense of morals are exposed to universal mockery and described as the last remnants of a bygone, stuffy world, always making convenient targets of popular reprisals.
The real danger of the Revolution does not lie, as we so often believe, in the transitory stage of popular mayhem excited by some leaders, in which the mob abandons itself to its instincts and rejoices in giving them free course. The true danger of the Revolution consists in its institutionalization of the disorder. Such is the ultimate goal of the revolutionaries, who very well know that man is primarily a social animal, deeply influenced by the world in which he lives. It is ridiculous, indeed, to dare to claim that the customs and fashions of our contemporaries have no influence upon us.
We live, however, at the time of the triumph of the Revolution. Institutions, families, ways of thinking, fashions, music, the most elementary rules of courtesy and even the Church herself are poisoned by the surrounding disorder. Nothing is left untouched. And what is truly lamentable is that we are so affected by it that we do not even realize that we are affected!
The characteristic of our times is not so much the errors that now abound and that are as old as the world, as a kind of spiritual AIDS in which we vegetate. Our soul has lost its immunological defenses - our intelligence swallows, without any discernment, whatever lies the media tell us and it is hardly interested in intellectual subjects. At the same time, our will, excited by the multiplication of the occasions of pleasure, has become the slave of our passions.
We must agree with St. Augustine, who said that "by seeing everything, we end supporting everything, and by supporting everything, we end accepting everything." It seems to us that the holy Bishop of Hippo perfectly describes our times, in which the Revolution rules as master of minds and hearts. Living in this institutionalized disorder, we barely distinguish good from evil. Thus, we sink into a practical relativism that imperceptibly but radically makes us lose the sense of what is true and real.
It is high time to react and free ourselves from this world of lies. We will do it only by becoming aware that this world deceives us by saturating us with polluted images, making us bend our knee before the idol of technical progress, rendering us slaves of flickering screens, or imposing upon us wretched models that are supposed to represent the ideal of a new era.
Let us return to the simple but true realities of family life. Especially, let us return to God by a life of prayer and sacrifice, in which we refuse to look at everything, because we aspire, one day, to see God face to face. Indeed, He is the only One who can satisfy our insatiable desire for love.
In Christo Sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux