Conrad Black: A Christian uprising is here to save the West

It has long been unfashionable in most of the Western world to discuss religion and particularly Christianity other than in an historical or sentimental or even somewhat condescending context. But important trends are changing: in the United States religious practice which was in decline for some decades, after being steady for more than five years, is increasing. The percentage of Americans who believe in the existence of some form of divine or at least supernatural intelligence has risen slightly to a formidable 86 per cent, while the numbers of regular religious practitioners, depending on definition, bottomed out at 44 per cent and have risen somewhat. The genius of the American founders is revealed again in embracing the Enlightenment, but not its tendencies to atheism, thus arming the nascent American people with both the zeal of material progress and the conviction of divine favour.

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The most startling example of this phenomenon was in Pope Leo XIV’s recent visit to France. He naturally went to the great pilgrimage centre of Lourdes, and to the splendidly renovated Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He also held a pan-European service at Metz, an ancient seat of an influential archbishop and of an elector of the Holy Roman Empire, but particularly as the native city of the fervently Catholic co-founder (with Jean Monnet) of the institutions of European co-operation and reconciliation, Robert Schuman.

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All these events were very heavily attended but no one was prepared for the colossal turn-out at the pope’s open air service in the Place de la Concorde. Paris has not been a particularly observant city in Catholic terms since the French Revolution and three of Paris’ four cardinal-archbishops between 1848 and 1871 were murdered by revolutionaries. The archdiocese was expecting tens or even scores of thousands of people to attend Pope Leo’s service, not an unusual expectation in a metropolitan area of approximately 13 million souls, the great majority of them ostensibly Roman Catholics.

Approximately 800,000 people packed the great square and filled the world-famous Avenue des Champs-Elysees up to the Arc de Triomphe and up the side approaches to Place Vendome and across the Seine to the Palais Bourbon and at the Place Clemenceau, mid-way toward the Arc de Triomphe. As the crowd grew, people authorized to distribute the sacraments were mobilized and it is estimated that nearly three quarters of a million people received communion. All French observers from the ancient sources of unshakable piety to the serried ranks of contemptuous disbelief expressed astonishment at this spontaneous assembly.

This is a considerably more important sociopolitical event than the current demonstrations in France originated and led by underage schoolchildren, which began with complaints of crumbling, rodent-infested facilities, under-heated in winter and stifling in summer. This has not so far hemorrhaged into a general strike and French society has limited sympathy for students, given the astronomical sum society spends on them. These demonstrations highlight the fact that the French welfare state with its collapsed birth rate and simmering Arab population and decades of socialist appeasement of discontented groups, has no more money to splash around to malcontented groups. But the current disturbances are essentially the French custom of rising up against authority every so often and hurling projectiles at police and blocking streets, now leavened somewhat by Muslim rioters piling on for esoteric reasons.

Eventually, France will have to devise some combination of raising the retirement age, seeking more assimilable immigration, reducing taxes, shrinking government, and doing the necessary to generate economic growth. The fact that the left-wing coalition, France Unbowed (France Insoumise), is stirring the pot and encouraging the disorder will ensure an unusually confrontational election next year with the Ralliement National, led by three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. It has worked hard to house-train itself since its origins as an antisemitic, xenophobic and somewhat Petainist movement founded by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom she eventually expelled from the party.

This is only politics, though the economic crisis is real. A surge in religiosity, especially among such a cynical nationality as the French, indicates the practical bankruptcy of the secularist enemies of spiritual values and beliefs and of the advocates of leftist flimflam about the perfectibility of man. Religious vacuums are usually ultimately filled by destructive nihilism, charlatans, and pagans, including terrestrial pretenders to deification such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

In France and the U.S. and in some other countries, this intimation of revival is coming mainly from young people. It is not so much a matter of religious practice as respect for the limitations of sensible human ambitions; the incurable shortcomings of the human personality and the moral value of conscientiousness. The Catholic tradition in France, identified with such gigantic historical personalities as King St. Louis IX and St. Joan of Arc, has never vanished. France has been one of the greatest national influences in the world throughout the history of the nation-state and French opinion, particularly the youth, feel that the secularists and the prophets of anti-spiritual materialism have failed, that there is more to civilization than a higher minimum wage and better daycare facilities.

The intellectual correlation of forces seems to be shifting toward acceptance that some spiritual forces exist and that there is some supernatural intelligence which sometimes intervenes in terrestrial affairs and may possibly be propitiated.

There is also the Muslim challenge. Now that the Roman Catholic Church has atoned for its shameful laxity in matters of sexual abuse, it is equipped with its central organization and more than one billion adherents, to lead the growing determination of the West to avoid being overrun by Islam. The Prophet came 600 years after Christ, and not wishing to be a martyr, he was a warrior. The Archangel Gabriel announced them both. Increasingly, atheism is seen as soulless decadence, inadequate and intolerant in its conceptions, and in its secular performance, and finally, thoroughly incapable of repelling the onslaught of militant Islam. We are not returning to crusades, inquisitions, or ecclesiastical fervour, but we are discarding militant atheism’s hostility to any notion of religion, and its failure to produce an intellectually and practically respectable substitute. Our Judeo-Christian values are important and will be defended.

National Post

Note: last week I incorrectly wrote that Camille Laurin had been arrested for shoplifting in Montréal. It was in fact his colleague Claude Charron. I relied on my memory which is usually trustworthy and apologize to readers for my error.

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