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Good job! You do understand what happened!
Submitted by Janet Baker (not verified) on December 10, 2011 - 1:40pm.
"Rather, the separation of church and state in Europe took shape from the unique institution of the Vatican, and its millennia-long fight against the separation of church and state."
I am so glad you put that comment. That makes you one among, let's see, eight or ten people I know who actually are aware of that fact. Traditional Catholicism is all about the religious state, and as many regulations as are necessary to protect the small, the weak, the helpless, the worker, the family.
Do you know that Vatican II (the 60's) was the only, the first, official step cancelling that long fight? And how we have lived to regret it! That's what the struggle between the present, liberal Vatican and SSPX is all about--it was the central fissure in Archbishop Lefebvre's broken heart, that the Council uncrowned Christ by endorsing the secular state. When the Church caved, the last protection the poor and working stiff had was swept away into the murky, polluted waters of the protestant revolt.
But we have need have no fear of Islam's call for the religious state. It is a reaction against secular autocracy, yes, I believe you are correct, but it will not last and it too will end in liberalism, partly because the islamic spring seems hell bent on what we know as democracy, the anti-democracy of our own secularism (in which the real choices are made elsewhere, and our electoral choices are carefully orchastrated). The other part is they have no magisterium, no teaching authority, they are hopelessly divided, and in the end they will end with religious liberty by right, and the inevitable secularism that goes with it. We have everything to fear from secularism--it is ending in slavery for us and the destruction of private property!--but nothing to fear from islam.
(This writer is dedicated to the exposure of all the statements and empty proclamations of that catastrophe known as Vatican II, and the restoration of our Catholic mission in the world. If you are, too, that makes about four of us. Quite enough, given the requisite miracle.)
