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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 6, 2003
National apostasy
The great thing about sermons on national apostasy delivered in the past in every Christian country was that they upset people. Some might argue and some might not but "apostasy" itself was considered a terrible thing. Today it is a word that would be more often misspelt if it were more often used; a spellchecker word a word to look up in a dictionary. I was thinking this in reading Pope John Paul II's apostolic exhortation published last week Ecclesia in Europa. It is an interesting document released after a Roman synod in which her bishops gathered to contemplate Jesus Christ, alive in his Church, the source of hope for Europe. The exhortation itself contemplates the "silent apostasy" of that new Europe -- the one that will proclaim a new constitution with a preamble on past glories that leaps from ancient Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment so as to avoid any mention of that controversial thing Christianity. A Europe whose bureaucrats have devoted themselves to stripping Chartres and Bach out of the historical record. Ecclesia in Europa was an unusual statement for any Pope more in the way it was said than in what it said. For while the Pope is giving his usual exhortations to Catholic and all Christians to get involved in the world to bring light into the darkness to evangelize even in unpropitious times he makes extensive use of Revelation. The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine is not frequently cited in public utterances even in the Bible Belt of America's deep south. The book is too strange and mysterious withal too frightening for everyday purposes. More than any book of the Christian Bible -- of which it is the endpiece -- it invites misunderstanding with its talk of the opening of the seals of a time of the end of Creation. It is a book of eschatology -- presenting a theology of "the four last things": Death Judgement Heaven Hell. As Genesis at the extreme other end of the Bible presented a theology of first things. "And when I saw him I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me saying unto me -- Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore; and have the keys of hell and of death." The passage I just quoted from the first chapter of Revelation is of huge significance to me; and I should think to every Christian who must prepare in the fullness of time to meet his maker. It is a passage so shot through with the presence of Christ that I once cracked the ice of a hardened atheist by reading it aloud. And it is to this book that the Pope instinctively turns in the course of his exhortation. And even when he is quoting the Gospels he turns to this passage in St. Luke: "When the Son of Man comes shall he find faith on the earth?" Adding Will he find faith in our countries, in this Europe of ancient Christian tradition? To that new Europe he tries to explain what is and is not man's to accomplish. The Pope describes the scroll written within and without sealed with the seven seals and held "in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne" -- the scroll which contains in every detail God's plan of creation and salvation. And no one can open that scroll or see or read it. "In the confusion of human affairs no one is able to declare the unfolding of the future and the ultimate meaning of things. Only Jesus Christ gains possession of the sealed scroll; only he is worthy to take the scroll and open its seals." Thus the Holy Father. It is at the heart of his indictment of this new Europe which with every advantage of outward freedom and prosperity and the symbols and reminders of its Christian humanist traditions still decorating its landscape has turned away from Christ to make its own arrangements with meaning and its own plans. The indictment could apply equally to Canada for the new Canada is no different from the new Europe in its contemptuous rejection of its own Christian past and its assumption that it can live both publicly and privately apart from God. We are engaged in a public experiment to see how far we can walk away. And already we have walked so far that God and his Christ are invisible to most; only a tinkle of fading church bells as we pass over the hill. Is this the end? It is a thought that has occurred to me repeatedly in the last weeks as I have watched the fabric of our society further rent by the latest attack of our courts and State on the institution of the family and listened to the silence with which it was greeted even from the pulpits. I glimpsed the new reality -- look we have gone mad! -- in a single frame this past week the front page of a newspaper. In one panel a celebration of "gay pride" with a picture of gay newlyweds at the front of their Toronto parade expressing their joy in an image that put me in mind of Alaric's footsoldiers prancing through the wreck of Rome. And in the adjoining panel a piece on the spread of "child poverty" -- but presented as if the two phenomena aren't related. Reason itself was among our traditions and the inability to grasp that our state's forty-year attack on our families is intimately involved in the fate of our children is just one sign of the times. Just one of so very many visible to the sighted wherever they turn. Our own national apostasy is now written into almost every scene of our public life from Cape Race to Nootka Sound. And yet -- there is no reason to give up hope. For as the Pope also reminded the Book of Revelation offers "an eschatology of hope"; and in the kernel of that scarifying passage in which Christ displays the keys of heaven and hell are those wonderful words: "Fear not." The apostates have come and will rule and will perish. God has the universe in his hands and good will come of all this evil. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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