More Evidence the West Is Dying

Aleksei Khomiakov once remarked that the West had ‘received death itself into its bosom’ by departing from the Orthodox Church - gradually from the 8^th to the 11^th centuries but definitively by 1054 A.D., the year of the Great Schism between East and West, as the Roman Popes took it upon themselves to redefine the Church’s Creed without consultation with and approval of the whole Church (‘Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris’ [1855], On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader, Bird, Robert, and Boris Jakim, trans., Hudson, Ny.: Lindisfarne Books, 1998, p. 102).

The appearance of scientific rationalism, Marxism, relativism, industrialism, total war, etc. in the West is proof enough of the truth of his statement, but sadly more evidence continues to arise.

First is the near indifference of the West to the many massacres of Christians across the Middle East and Asia occasioned by the meddling of the American Empire and her allies in those regions (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, etc.).  The latest, in Sadad, Syria, near the end of October, has received the same scant attention:  29,300 results for ‘Sadad massacre’ vs. 1,480,000,000 results for ‘Black Friday’ in Google searches conducted on 22 Nov. 2013.

Srdja Trifkovic brings to light what the Western Powers That Be have hidden in the dark:

When a false-flag atrocity occurs of which Muslims are the purported victims, the United States goes to war to save them—the January 1999 stage-managed “massacre” at Račak, in Kosovo, being a classic example. When all-too-real massacres of Christians by Muslims take place, they are unreported in the Western media and uncommented upon by Western politicians.

“Slaughter in Syria: 45 Christians Killed by Islamists in Sadad and Thrown into Mass Graves,” CatholicOnline reported on November 5. The facts of the case are obvious from the rebels’ own shockingly gruesome footage ( here with English subtitles ) and from the government forces’ initial video report after liberating the town (viewer discretion advised). As The Tablet reported on the same day, civilians unable to escape – including the elderly, disabled, women and children—were subjected to death by torture, including strangulation. The bodies of six members of a single Christian family, aged 16 to 90, were found in a well, prompting the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III to ask, “How can somebody do such inhumane and bestial things to an elderly couple and their family? I do not understand why the world does not raise its voice against such acts of brutality.”

 . . .

The problem, of which Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh appears unaware, is no longer in the Western elite’s mere indifference to the impending demise of Christianity in the lands of its birth, but in its active, ongoing, and open contribution to that demise. Cyprus (1974) and the Balkans (1991-9) provided the test, Iraq (2003-today) the conclusive proof. In Syria the Obama administration remains committed to supporting the rebels—ah, yes, only the “moderate” ones, like the Christian-murdering “Free Syrian Army” (discretion advised again), not “even though” the result will be the same, but precisely because it will be.

The spiritual inspiration, ideological outlook, methods and long-term objectives of Bashar al-Assad’s fighting foes is no longer in doubt. That makes them the natural allies of the Clintons, Obamas and McCains of this world, who have naturally progressed from being “post-Christian” to being zealously anti-Christian. For the fruits of their labors just ask the non-Muslim former denizens of Famagusta, Sarajevo, Pristina, Benghazi, or Baghdad.

Full story:  http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2013/11/08/latest-massacre-of-syrian-christians-covered-up-in-the-west/

The other sign is the continuing decline of the Vatican into relativism.  From Pat Buchanan:

“Pope Francis doesn’t want cultural warriors; he doesn’t want ideologues,” said Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, Wash.:

“The nuncio said the Holy Father wants bishops with pastoral sensitivity, shepherds who know the smell of the sheep.”

Bishop Cupich was conveying instructions the papal nuncio had delivered from Rome to guide U.S. bishops in choosing a new leader.

They chose Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., who has a master’s degree in social work, to succeed Archbishop Timothy Dolan whom Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times describes thus:

“[A] garrulous evangelist comfortable in front of a camera, [who] led the bishops in their high-profile confrontation with the Obama administration over a provision in the health care mandate that requires most employers to have insurance that covers contraceptives for employees.”

That mandate also requires employers to cover abortion-inducing drugs and sterilizations.

Yet here is further confirmation His Holiness seeks to move the Catholic Church to a stance of non-belligerence, if not neutrality, in the culture war for the soul of the West.

There is a small problem with neutrality. As Trotsky observed, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” For the church to absent itself from the culture war is to not to [sic] end that war, but to lose it.

Full article:  http://buchanan.org/blog/papal-neutrality-culture-war-5995 (thanks to lewrockwell.com)

Dr Joseph Farrell, in his monumental work God, History, and Dialectic, speaks of ‘two Europes’.  The first is the Europe that was baptized by the Holy Apostles and their disciples into the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church - today known simply as the Orthodox Church.  When the Great Schism occurred in 1054, the civilization of the first Europe continued to exist in Eastern Europe and Russia (and exists to this day in those countries and wherever else Orthodox Christians live, though in many cases not without some corruption by Western ideas).

The civilization of the second Europe that grew up in Western Europe after the Schism and that has spread to North and South America, Australia, South Africa, etc., being separated from the original Faith, has been dying since its very birth.  About this Dr Farrell writes,

Perhaps the best and simplest way of putting this complexity, however, is to point out the fact that St. Augustine, architect of the vast philosophical Cathedrals of the Second Hellenization, was in his time still a part of the Church of the First Europe, an Orthodox Christian father dwelling in the First Europe’s Church. Such a position he ardently wished to maintain, and such a position he still has on the rolls of the Eastern Church’s saints. Thus the ambiguities of Augustine and Augustinism are at the core of the historiographical task to be performed by these essays. For Augustine the bishop and Augustinism the system are two different things. Augustine the bishop insisted, no less vigorously than his great counterparts in Cappadocia — Sts. Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus — on the direct continuity of the Church with the ancient Hebrews and with the cultural autonomy conferred on them by God. But Augustine the Hellenizer erected a system founded upon a continuity of theology with Greek philosophy, a continuity of incalculable enormity: the identification of The One (to en) of Greek philosophy with the One God and Father of Christian doctrine. That marriage of Theology and Philosophy occurred not at some secondary level of doctrine, but at the core, at the height, of all Christian belief, the doctrine of God Himself. So long as this cohabitation went undetected and unchallenged, so long did its hidden implications take root, grow, and eventually overwhelm and choke the Christian component. Our current moral and spiritual crisis is the result of that marriage, and will not be resolved until the churches which persist in it, beginning with Rome, repent and recant the error. For Augustine saw discontinuity with that Graeco-pagan world, but the theologians, philosophers, and humanists who came after him and who were the heirs of his system, came increasingly to see continuity.

Thus, at its core the Second Europe is pagan, for it worships a pagan definition of God, pagan, for it is crumbling from within, over laden only with an increasingly thin and superficial veneer of a Christian idiom. From the standpoint of the First Europe, then, the Second is in the continual process of actualizing the unwitting, but nevertheless, great apostasy contained in the system of Augustine. Even its “bold” and “radical” modern “reinterpreters” of Christianity — an Elaine Pagels or a Rudolph Bultmann or a Julius Wellhausen — are less revolutionary than they think, for they are as much products of the Second Hellenization as their mediaeval forefathers.

--‘Prolegomena to God, History, and Dialectic’ (unpaginated), 2008, available as a free dowload at http://godhistorydialectic.wordpress.com/read-this-first/

One of Khomiakov’s favorite passages to cite was from the ‘Synodal Letter of the Eastern Patriarchs’ (1848):  ‘Knowledge of the divine truths was given to the mutual love of Christians and had no other guardian but this love’ (‘Some Remarks by an Orthodox Christian Concerning the Western Communions, on the Occasion of a Letter Published by the Archbishop of Paris’ [1855], On Spiritual Unity, p. 112).  So long as Western Christians (including Southerners) remain outside of this mutual love, outside of ‘the saving enclosure of the Orthodox Church’ (Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, 3rd ed., Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2010,  p. 1061), so long will they continue down the path of spiritual, and thus also physical, destruction. 

But the Orthodox Church is always ready to accept back into her fold her children who have gone astray, whether knowingly or in ignorance.  Let us not be insensible to the voices of our fathers and mothers among the saints of the first Europe, who plead with us to return to the True Faith, and who continually pray to the Lord for our salvation.