"Don't Devalue Christian Heritage"

Fr Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, located in Grand Rapids, MI, has an excellent column published in today's Detroit News. Go read the whole thing - I've included only a couple snippets.

[...]

It does not take the training of a professional sociologist to realize that a major cultural shift regarding faith, morals and the place of Christianity is under way in Western Civilization. And this has nothing, really, to do with some haphazard lightning strike in Ohio.

Consider the following, which is a mere sampling of recent efforts to undermine the place of faith in the public life of Western democracies:

• The European Union's insistence that neither God nor the Christian Church be mentioned in its Constitution, despite the clear historical role belief in the form and the institution of the latter played in the formation of Europe.

• The litany (if you will excuse the pun) of coarse jokes, cheap shots and outright viciousness directed specifically at the person of Christ or the Christian faith on TV and which are passed over by the same people who would readily file hate crime charges against their promoters if addressed to any other religion.

• The subtle but clear shift in language away from "freedom of religion" to "freedom of worship" on the part of the current administration, retaining only one dimension of religion (worship) while setting the stage to curtail its public witness. It is freedom of religion, not merely worship that has been venerated since the American founding.

[...]

The very idea of limited government and hence tolerance (yes, tolerance, which is not to be confused with the relativism offered as a substitute) emerge from the Judeo-Christian view of the sovereignty of God in personal and social life, rather than the sovereignty of political elites.

The very juridical systems we have grown accustomed to -- and have been the envy of the world -- did not just appear; they unfolded from the logic of the biblical faith. So, too, with the scientific method which followed from the knowledge that, if things are ordered by a divine plan and we are made in the image of God, then the truth of the physical world is knowable to reason.

Christianity has endowed Western Civilization with a priceless heritage. To lose this to a mass amnesia in the culture, would be an inestimable loss to the sense of who we are as a people and to any real hope we might have of building a just and tolerant future.

IMHO, I don't think it's as much as "mass amnesia" as it's a case of willful disregard. To admit that Christianity has impacted Western Civilization would also mean they'd have to consider the mores and truths that Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, have proposed for centuries. There really can't be any picking and choosing. That'd be like saying that the Law of Gravity is great, but the Third Law of Thermodynamics? Heck no, not for me!! Just as we are all subject to the laws of physics, or the laws of mathematics, we are also subject to the Natural Law and ultimately, subject to God. And there lies the rub. We all accept the fact that 1+1=2, or that if you light a match near leaking gas, you'll blow up. But admit we are not in control of our own destiny? Or that there is a Higher Power who will one day judge us? Nope, not gonna happen.

It's becoming easier and convenient for Western Civilization to ignore and denigrate Christianity across the board, to the peril of us all. For some - perhaps many - that peril is eternal. For others - believers who stand for Truth - it's temporal. Battle lines are emerging more clearly.

The question is - what are we going to do about it?