Month: June 2006

[Given everything going on in the Episcopal church this past week, I thought some of you might find my June column in Challenge Magazine — a Canadian Catholic monthly — of interest. PJV]
Christendom vs. Christophobia

Pete Vere
“It’s as though a spiritual tsunami hit our shores, beginning in the early sixties,” Mark Mallett said. “The earthquake that started it all began several hundred years ago when the Church lost its powerful influence in society through the French Revolution. The first powerful wave to hit North America was contraception.”
His words left me stunned. Mark Mallett is one of Alberta’s most well-known Catholic musicians. He happened to be passing through our small Northern Ontario community last fall. Taking advantage of the situation, our pastor invited Mark to give a concert at the parish. I was blessed with the opportunity to interview Mark prior to the concert.
“The world dismissed Pope Paul VI’s warning about the dangers of the pill,” Mark continued, “but he was right. As this wave hit shore, it began tearing apart marriage and the family, with no-fault divorce becoming available. As this tsunami continued through the seventies and eighties, it literally destroyed life as abortion laws eased and STD’s proliferated. Through the nineties, pornography and the AIDS epidemic exploded as sexuality and its true essence continued to be washed away. Then, I believe, the wave came to a stop this past summer, as the very image of the Trinity–marriage–was redefined.”
“Once you take the very image in whom we are created, and invert it, that has grave consequences for the future.”
Mark would go on to give an excellent concert. His music was clearly inspired by Pope John Paul II, the Blessed Mother, and Our Lord’s Real Presence. Yet I found it difficult to focus during the concert. His prophecy concerning our nation’s future continued to haunt me. Quo vadis, Canada?
I remember the vote in the House of Commons. Aiden Reid, Campaign Life Coalition’s Director of Public Affairs, had invited me to join him in the Visitor’s Gallery. Together we watched as parliament debated the third and final reading of Bill C-38 – the bill that attempted to re-define marriage to include homosexual pairings.
When the vote passed, the stained-glass window behind the Speaker’s chair went dark. This struck me as an ominous sign; the sun had set on Parliament Hill. I shivered. “If we are arrogant enough to destroy the very institution God created for the stability of society,” I said to Aidan. “Then this bears grave consequences for the future of our country.”
Yet how did we arrive at such a point in Canada’s history? In seeking an answer to this question, an evangelical Protestant friend of mine recommended Rev. Tristan Emmanuel’s Christophobia: The Real Reason Behind Hate Crime Legislation (Freedom Press, Ontario, 2003). My friend assured me that the author sided with the Culture of Life and that he had extensively researched the pernicious influence of secularism and homosexuality within our culture.
Tristan Emmanuel is a Presbyterian minister. He currently works with the evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants community in Canada. He organizes them and helps them to become more politically active. This is no small feat as fundamentalists and evangelicals traditionally have a short attention span when engaged in politics.
Christophobia is Tristan Emmanuel’s attempt to explain how secularists and homosexuals seized Canada’s political agenda. Their ultimate target, Emmanuel believes, is Christians. Legislation like Bill C-38 and C-250 is designed to silence Christians from preaching the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Tristan argues his points with sincerity, conviction, and quite a few facts.
“The record of judicial activism has sown deep suspicion in the hearts and minds of reasonable people,” he concludes in one of his closing chapters. “The bottom line is that in Canada, religious rights are relative, while the rights of homosexuals are absolute.”
Keeping in mind that Bill C-250 had not yet passed when Emmanuel first published the book, the author continues with the following warning: “Bill C-250, or whatever will be proposed to replace it, will exacerbate this situation because it will give activist judges the legal billy club to accuse Christians of hate crime. The evidence is there for anyone to read. Left wing, activist, God-hating judges who want to erase the Christian heritage of this nation have been itching to criminalize Christian debate, speech, writing and text, and any expressed opinion about the (negative) moral dimensions of homosexuality. Hate crime legislation will be the tool they’ll use to achieve this goal. Outrageous as it may seem, they are on the verge of getting away with it.”
Here is where I disagree with our Protestant friend. The criminalization of Christianity does not seem outrageous when one takes a Catholic view of history. For secularism and the culture of death are little more than the logical outgrowth of Protestantism.
If the French Revolution gave birth to the spiritual tsunami described by Mark Mallett, it was nevertheless conceived by the Protestant Revolt. Martin Luther’s heresy of Sola Scriptura destroyed the unity of the Christian faith in the western world. Under Protestantism, man replaced God as the judge of all that was holy and moral.
Similarly, contraception may have flamed the current culture of death, but King Henry VIII’s divorce is the tinder that started it. Anglicans were the first Christians since the gnostics of the early Church to permit the breaking the sacrament of marriage. Is it mere coincidence that the Anglican Communion was the first Christian denomination to permit contraception?
Thus no one should be shocked when Anglicans in Canada “bless” so-called same-sex unions. Nor should anyone be surprised when Anglicanism’s American counterpart, the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, attempted to consecrate a practicing homosexual to the episcopate. The Anglican promotion of the homosexual agenda is nothing more than the unnatural outgrowth of King Henry VIII, founder of the Church of England, refusing to live up to his wedding vows.
From lust was the Anglican Communion founded, and to lust will the Anglican Communion return. History simply ain’t ecumenical in this respect. Under Christendom, Christ was King of Society. Under Anglicanism, an adulterer.
This is why I was struck by Christophobia’s references to Christ the King within a political context. “Strictly speaking,” Tristan Emmanuel writes, “politics is a natural development and application of my faith. I absolutely believe that Jesus Christ is the King of kings. And that is, if nothing else, a very political statement.”
A few paragraphs later, the author speaks of a spiritual awakening of sorts. “That night, I realized that Christ was King who died for me. A King. He wasn’t just some guy. He wasn’t just a good man, not just a great teacher, not even simply the Savior. No. Christ, the Son of God, was a King. The King of kings, the King of the whole universe, and He was my King.”
This is well and good. Christ is King. He is our King. Yet our separated brother misses the obvious: every king must possess a kingdom over which he governs. In the case of Our Lord Jesus Christ, this kingdom was Christendom–at least until Protestantism shattered it into pieces. This in turn opened the door to secularism and an aggressive homosexual agenda.
“Community spirit prohibited the breaking with custom, and custom maintained community spirit,” Dom Gérard Calvet, the Abbot of Ste. Madeleine du Barroux monastery, explains in Tomorrow Christendom. “So that a child born into the world of Christendom was surrounded by a forest of signs, rites, and sacramentals which spoke to him of his duties, before he learned to read, even before the catechism presented him with the precepts of the Decalogue. Without waiting to receive religion from the mouth of the priest, he ‘caught it’ from his surroundings, by way of contagion. From this point of view, Christendom can be considered the outer garment of the Ten Commandments. An outer garment of flesh and bone, an ornament of poetry, gestures, formulas, chants, not bereft of beauty […] The disappearance of these customs and traditions is the death knell of civilizations.”
Calvet then quotes the following words from Gustave Thibon, a French author and philosopher: “So, what do I care about the past as past? Don’t you see that when I weep over the break with a tradition, it is especially about the future that I am thinking? When I see a root decaying, I pity the flowers that will shrivel up tomorrow, for want of sap.”
Canada is decaying as a nation. Marriage is the root of every strong civilization, and yet our marriages are anything but strong. I see it every day in my apartment complex. My wife and I know several other parents in our building; yet as far as I know we are the only married couple. This does not bode well for the future. Repeated studies show that married heterosexual couples provide the most stable environment in which to raise children.
Hence the reason Catholicism and Christendom sought to protect marriage. Hence the reason Catholicism and Christendom bestowed upon the sacrament of marriage a favoured status within the law. Not simply was doing so moral, it was political and sociological as marriage was vital to long-term preservation and growth of society. Without marriage, society would once again degenerate into barbarism.
Same-sex marriage marks another milestone on the slippery slope to barbarism. Gang shootings in Toronto no longer shock us. One hundred thousand abortions a year hardly earns a whisper in the mainstream media. Group sex among strangers is now protected by Canada’s Supreme Court provided that the participants are consenting adults – an adult being defined as fourteen years of age when it comes to sexual intercourse. News of eight people found shot dead – Ontario’s biggest mass murder in some time – simply disappears from the media after a couple of days.
Why? Because nobody is interested. Without Christ as King of our society, everyone’s focus falls upon the individual rather than society and family. As long as it does not affect me personally, who cares?
Yet this coarsened culture is neither the fruit of secularism nor of the homosexual agenda. Rather its roots lay in Martin Luther’s revolt from the Christian faith, along with Henry VIII’s revolt from Christian morals. It is Protestantism that uncrowned Christ as King; at the root of Christophobia one finds Martin Luther’s non serviam coupled with Henry VIII’s unwillingness to control his natural urges.
Hence there is only one answer to Christophobia, just as there is only one antidote to the dark times that await the future of Canada. It is Catholicism and a return to Christendom.