Column sponsored by Aid to the Church in Need, Ireland www.acnireland.org
At present, Ireland is undergoing a process of cultural cleansing of Catholicism – where even the memory of the Catholic faith is being expunged, save for where a hostile public perception can be catalysed through the media and leveraged for political advantage. The World Meeting of Families is, thus, an opportunity for not just Catholic families but The Catholic Family to gather in faith, hope and love in witness to our faith in Christ and the inestimable contributions and sacrifices made by the suffering and persecuted Church. This is the Church that Aid to the Church in Need serves – because for the majority of Christians, for the majority of our history we have suffered and been persecuted for proclaiming and living the Gospel. The World Meeting of Families is thus your opportunity to shine a light in the darkness of secularism, progressivism and nihilism currently engulfing the Western world – and whose primary target of attacks has been the Christian family and the faith they animate.
Apathy is a great moral malaise of our times. When faced with knowledge, an apathy that persists in willful ignorance metastasizes into complicity. Political classes in the West know that Christians are defenceless in the Middle East and Asia. They know that Christians are being extirpated from their homelands in pursuit of the most warped ideologies. We can now see that – where in developing nations there has been a declaration of war against Christians in body, in the West there has been a declaration of war again Christians in soul. When we speak of persecution we mean an unjust, sustained and violent subjugation or elimination against a group of people. The ferocity of western secularism and militant Islam’s persecution against Christians reveals what the source of their ire is: Christianity itself. While their means may differ, their ends are the same: the extinction of Christianity. Simply by existing, Christians homicidally offend the worldview of both secularists and Islamists and present legitimate targets of destruction and so we must realise that by protecting our Christian brethren we are in fact also protecting Christianity.
It is true that, as Pope St. John Paul II noted, ‘humanity passes by way of the family’ but – as recent referendum results have revealed explicitly – when family is passed upon, humanity passes away. Sadly, when we lose God we will always, eventually lose Man because our dignity and our beauty and humanity can only be fully realized when we acknowledge His Divinity…and countless millions of Christians continue to suffer professionally, culturally and existentially as a result of very often state-sanctioned Christian persecution. Yes, the war against life and family in Ireland was lost in the culture before it was lost in the ballot box but – crucially – our power and our legitimacy as the people of God is not sourced nor is it vindicated nor can it be sustained in the ballot box, through media campaigns or through the empty reassurances of conniving politicians, unaccountable bureaucrats, corporate elites or political parties. It comes only and fully through the emulation of Christ’s life and sacrifice in everything we think and do – individually and as families.
As a Catholic charity, ACN supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in need. In these times of increasingly angry and violent marginalisation of Christians in public life, we must all still serve the cause of evangelisation through our prayers and through our actions. We must respond courageously to the manifold challenges and threats of our time – being especially aware of how human life and indeed family life is being exploited, subverted and destroyed. In so doing, our commitment to the persecuted Church becomes a source of inspiration and courage and conviction for those Christians who are still being oppressed and persecuted and martyred on account of their faith. ACN Ireland invites you, now and in perpetuity, to join with us in prayer and in action to help our Christian brothers and sisters so that we can – as a charity, as a community and as people of God – help make a world in which Christianity can thrive everywhere.
Director Michael Kinsella is National Director, Aid to the Church in Need.
