Fr. Anthony Chadwick (TAC): New Hope in Europe – Holy Russia

...Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, said to the Pope: that the Catholic Church will not be alone in the new evangelization of dechristianized Europe, because it will have at its side the Russian Orthodox Church, “no longer a competitor, but an ally.” The Russian Church has seen many things change for the better under Benedict XVI, quite apart from the fact that the Russians detest the Poles. Benedict XVI is made of the theological and intellectual stuff that the Orthodox admire, and the fact that dechristianisation has to be beaten before it beats the Churches. We can only do this together. The third vital dimension is mutually embracing the great Christian Tradition at the heart of the Church’s mission to Europe.

What strikes me in Patriarch Kirill’s writing, Norm of Faith as Norm of Life, is a convergence with a former reflection of mine in The Anglo-Catholic, that of the futility of moral and political combats without first transmitting the faith. Before we can fight the evils of abortion and perverted sexuality and other such problems of society, we have to transmit faith in God and the experience of conversion to Christ. Otherwise, activism is futile. How refreshing it is to read the teaching of the Patriarch of Moscow!

The first notion to come out is that of Tradition, but the great tradition and not the ideology of marginal groups of western Christian reactionaries. He urges us to a totally different philosophy of life based on man’s transfiguration and sanctification. The big problem we all suffer is not having the spiritual health needed to defend ourselves from the rot of relativism and what Pope John Paul II called the culture of death. The Patriarch traces the history of the liberal Enlightenment ideas and the rejection of Tradition, chiefly expressed by the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation.

He has this to say about some of the current problems in the west:

If we look at the question of female priesthood or that of the admission of homosexuality, is not this perhaps precisely what happens today? Both of the questions confirm, among other things, the thesis about the liberal nature of Protestantism, as previously defined. It is absolutely evident that the introduction of female priesthood and the admission of homosexuality have taken place under the influence of a certain liberal vision of human rights: a vision in which these rights are radically opposed to sacred tradition.

Now, the Patriarch would not then go and deny man all freedom and subject him to slavery, but rather establish the basis of a different anthropology from that with which we have become familiar in the liberal and anti-traditional west. It is the same liberty of perfection as we find in the moral theology of St Thomas Aquinas. The truth makes us free. True liberty is freedom from sin, determinism and mechanisation. It is the freedom that comes through suffering and asceticism. A vital dimension in this emancipation is the communion of the Church. We are made for love and community, not for individual isolation and alienation.

The modern conception of liberalism has penetrated into every institution and each one of us, and it is the greatest obstacle to evangelisation. How do we do something about it? Do we resort to terrorism and violence, or what? This is precisely the question I asked in my other article.

Read the rest here. I strongly recommend it in its entirety.