Remnant Review
Except when he offers his views on tariffs, namely, that sales taxes on imports would help America, I like Pat Buchanan's views. He sees that the West is in a state of moral decline.
He sees that Europe is committing suicide demographically. This is visible in the various national birth rates: below replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. The silver medalist in Western Europe's race to extinction is Italy, a supposedly Catholic country. The birth rate is below 1.4 children per woman, meaning below replacement rate. It is way below.
The gold medalist is Catholic Spain. It had the highest birth rate in Western Europe in the 1970's when Franco was alive. Today, it is at the bottom: 1.3 children per woman.
"The drop in fertility is associated with the rapid shift to democracy," explained Gerardo Meil, senior professor of sociology at the Autonomous University of Madrid.From 1939 to 1975, Spain was under the rule of dictator Francisco Franco. Meil explained that during Franco's reign, women were expected to have many children and stay home to raise them. While birth rates in the rest of Europe were slowly declining, Spain remained a country where the average family consisted of three or more kids.
With Franco's death in 1975, though, the culture changed rapidly. During this period, access to education, contraceptives and divorce increased for women, while birth rates plummeted. "In the past it was a priority to get married and have children. It is not anymore," said Macarron.
Currently, 20 percent of the population is younger than 25, while 35 percent is over the age of 55. By 2050, Spain, which today has 47 million people, is expected to have the highest median age in the world, with half of Spaniards over the age of 55, the World Bank estimates.
Yet the Catholic church has an official policy banning any artificial contraception. The attitude of Catholics everywhere is seen in this ditty regarding papal authority: "He no play-a the game; he no make-a the rules." He chose celibacy. The people in the pews did not. The entire Catholic church shrugged off Catholic dogma on birth control 70 years ago. It never gave a thought to the Church's official teaching.
Hardly anyone in authority comes out and says: "The Church is wrong on this policy." People just pay no attention to it. They are oblivious to the implications of their views on Catholic theology and practice. They do not fear the church's authority in the slightest. No family comes under discipline for having families of two children or fewer. The church's hierarchy has implicitly adopted this statement of faith: "We no play-a the game, so we no enforce-a the rules." The church has been visibly content with this arrangement for 70 years. In Spain, it has been content for 40 years. Franco took a long time to die. He held the priests' feet to the fire on this issue. They went along to get along. No longer.
Last year, Buchanan wrote an article with a question mark: "Is the Pope Toying with Heresy?" It surely looked as though the Pope was toying with heresy. This is why the liberal media initially loved this Pope. Buchanan wrote:
Are Catholic truths immutable? Or can they change with the changing times?This is the deeper question behind the issues that convulsed the three-week synod on the family of the 250 Catholic bishops in Rome that ended Saturday.
A year ago, German Cardinal Walter Kasper called on the church to change -- to welcome homosexual couples, and to permit cohabiting and divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
Retorted traditionalists: This is heresy.
Had the pope followed his friend Cardinal Kasper and ordered Catholic teaching and diocesan practice changed, he could have provoked a schism inside the Church.
Such a change in doctrine would have called into question papal infallibility. Defined at the Vatican Council of 1869-70, that doctrine declares that when the pope teaches ex cathedra, on matters of faith and morals, he is protected from error by the Holy Ghost. Doctrinal truths, taught by popes in communion with the bishops, down through the ages, cannot change.
But if Catholic truths about the indissolubility of marriage and intrinsic immorality of homosexual unions can be changed, then, either the Church has been in grave error in the past, or the Church is toying with heresy today.
He wrote this on October 10, 2015.
The Pope recently has affirmed the church's opposition to the re-classifying of gay unions under the category "marriage." The media have gone into apoplexy. The Huffington Post headline says it all: Pope Francis Can Begin By Apologizing For His Own Hateful Words Against Gays.
Last week the media gave a lot of attention to Pope Francis agreeing that the Catholic Church owed an apology to gays. But his statement, while positive on its face, deflected from horrendous remarks Francis himself made in the past and which he can and should personally apologize for right now.
So, on this issue, Buchanan represents the Pope's view. But if we apply his reasoning to the issue of artificial birth control, we find that his warning applies just as well. Paraphrased: "But if Catholic truths about the immorality of artificial birth control can be changed, then, either the Church has been in grave error in the past, or the Church is toying with heresy today." The Church has avoided the issue by ignoring the universal violation of its teaching by married Church members.
Europe is committing demographic suicide. In several cogently argued books, most notably The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002), Buchanan has stated that the West, led by Western Europe, has adopted family planning policies that will lead to national extinction. By national extinction, he means the disappearance of whites. The region will still be filled with people -- just not white people.
Well, so what? Let the dead bury the dead.
NATIONHOOD AND WORLDVIEW
Nationhood is a package deal. It has to do with a way of life. This way of life has to do with identifiable theologies -- worldviews, in other words. These worldviews are revealed in birth rates. The key outlook of the upper class is future orientation. Edward Banfield made this point in The Unheavenly City (1968). The supreme mark of future orientation is this: large families. A nation with a declining population is lower class, no matter what its educational level is. It has adopted a specific worldview: "And behold joy and gladness, killing calves, and slaying rams, eating flesh, and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die" (Isaiah 22:13; Douay-Rheims).
Buchanan's irrefutable statistics can be traced to a single fact in Catholic countries: the abandonment of Catholic moral teaching on artificial contraception. But this is the symptom, not the cause. He has identified the cause: "Either the Church has been in grave error in the past, or the Church is toying with heresy today." It is not toying with Catholic heresy. It has adopted it. It is making whoopie the Protestant way. Buchanan writes:
In confusion, and at risk of going the way of the Protestant churches that continue to hemorrhage congregants.Recall.
With its acceptance of birth control at the Lambeth conference of 1930, the Church of England started down this road, as did its sister, the Episcopal Church. The process led to the decline of both.
Buchanan is like a priest who is preaching to two rowboats with three married couples each. The boats are five miles from shore. The people inside cannot swim. The Protestant rowboat has an eight-inch hole in it. The Catholic rowboat has a six-inch hole. He preaches to the Protestants: "You started it!" The correct answer is: "So what?" Why? Because immigrants will finish it. Their rowboats do not have any holes.
The theology of artificial birth control moved from Protestantism (Amish excepted) to Catholics at least a generation ago (Spain) or earlier (Italy).
Buchanan thinks that Western Civilization is based on Christianity. So do I. He thinks it is based on Catholicism. I do not. But this much is true: the future-orientation that has always been basic to Christianity is dying in Europe. This is because Christianity is dying. In more ways than one, Christians are going through the motions. The faith is becoming sterile.
Here is my point: Buchanan can call the Catholic faithful to have more children. He can bewail the demographic decline of Europe. But if this decline is merely a symptom of Europe's abandonment of Christianity, then the correct response to declining birth rates is: "So what?" The patient has spiritual cancer. Taking away his condoms is not going to make him well.
THE BATTLE IN THE BEDROOMS
Islam has high birth rates, but this is changing. It is changing especially fast in Iran, which is now below replacement rate. Around the world, Islamic birth rates are falling.
Nevertheless, if Muslims maintain birth rates above 2.1 children per woman, and Catholics in Italy and Spain do not, then Islam will inherit Italy and Spain. So far, this is happening.
If the Christianity of Western Europe is so present-oriented that it cannot keep pace with Islam in the bedroom, it will do no good to preach about having an extra child. Again, the cause is more deeply rooted than the adoption of condoms. Standing on the sidelines and saying, "Oh, woe!" about comparative birth rates is an exercise in futility.
If Western Europe has abandoned Christianity, which it did with abandon after World War II, then it is neither here nor there that whites will lose Europe. Either Christendom is worth defending against all challenges, or else the critics are merely racists in drag. "Gotta stop them wogs!" Why? "'Cause they're wogs!"
Demography is not destiny. People can change their minds. But the death of the West from A.D. 70 to A.D. 325 -- the death of Roman civilization -- was a good thing. That version of the West deserved to die. Yes, they had aqueducts. They also had the Colosseum. They needed to be replaced. They were replaced.
The spiritual heirs of the Roman Empire now run Western Europe. They have water systems. They have universities. So what?
Let the dead bury the dead.
Better a Europe dominated by black Pentecostals than the European Union. Black Pentecostals living in Western Europe have high birth rates.
I would rather see Christian immigrants from sub-Sahara Africa than the slow death of the condom-loving pagans of Western Europe.
This is not to say that I would rather see an Islamic Europe than a re-Christianized Europe. But if a social order cannot defend itself in the bedroom, barbed wire fences will only slow down its surrender. Islamic residents are inside the gates now. The battlefield is in the bedrooms. The pagan whites are losing.
CONCLUSIONS
As a Protestant, I have watched virtually all Catholics warmly embrace their wives and Protestant theology: it's none of the church's business to tell members not to use condoms. I can think of no other area in life where Protestants have been more successful in persuading Catholics to adopt Protestant theological ethics. Buchanan is correct: this really does call into question the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Not my problem.
The whites' demographic problem in Catholic countries is also not my problem. Let the Pope deal with it. He is in charge of the Roman Catholic Church (it says here). But if he no enforce-a the rules, his successors in the Vatican won't have followers in Western Europe in a few centuries.
Do the math.
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