Recently our state sponsored intellectuals have been waxing indignant about the fact that the recently elected Pope is Catholic. They have not yet complained about bears shitting in the woods.
But, in fact, the Pope is not Catholic. He is progressive, merely less progressive and more Catholic than our state sponsored intellectuals would prefer.
Our state sponsored intellectuals are indignant because the Pope opposes abortion, women priests, gay marriage, homosexual bishops and so on and so forth. (I would have thought that the Church was seriously oversupplied with homosexual Bishops, but I suppose the objection is that they are not openly homosexual, or not open enough)
But notice that our state sponsored intellectuals are not attacking him for supporting marital rape (traditional Christian marriage) and the enslavement of women (traditional Christian marriage)
The traditional Christian position is that marriage was an irrevocable contract in which both spouses agreed each to be always sexually available to the other. If you are married, you don’t need consent for sex. You need consent to refrain from sex – and you are not even supposed to give consent to refrain from sex too easily or for too long. You are supposed to “rape” your spouse, in order to maintain the marriage. This seems reasonable to me, for my observation suggests that if people consent to stop having sex, they are apt to not resume, and pretty soon the marriage breaks up.
If there is such a thing as “marital rape”, then it is impossible to contract to marry and stay married, which is a massive violation of freedom of contract, which violation of freedom of contract gravely impairs our ability to form families and reproduce.
In fact, the Roman Catholic Church still supports that position – in Spanish. In English, however, it is silent. It seems that state sponsored intellectuals cannot speak Spanish, hence “rape” is one of the few things they are not attacking the Pope for.
Now since I think that all religions are at best pious frauds, at best a collection of children’s stories embodying ancient wisdom, at worst evil scams, Roman Catholics might reasonably say this is none of my business. Trouble is, while Jesus gives permission to ditch any parts of the Old Testament that might prove inconvenient, no Christian has permission to ditch the New Testament. If the priest ditches the politically incorrect parts of the New Testament, people smell that he does not really believe, and the churches empty out and turn into museums.
I regret the passing of Christianity. Europe is the faith, the faith is Europe. Civilizations die when their animating religion dies. We will likely need a new religion, or some synthetic substitute, or shall vanish utterly. When a people lose their religion they are apt, like the Romano British, to disappear. In much of the Roman Empire in the west, the people remained and had descendents, but came under the rule of foreign aristocracies formed by invading bandits. The Romano British were, however, pretty thoroughly genocided except in those areas least subject to Roman influence. The same will likely happen to much of today’s Europe.