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In these first few days of the year of Our Lord 2026 I will not talk much of the current events in Venezuela. Of all the vast Spanish Empire still standing in the early 1800’s the ideas of the French Revolution landed precisely there, in Venezuela. There, Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar and others began the revolutionary activities that eventually fragmented the Spanish Empire into a number of independent republics. Those movements were mainly financed by the British who had recently lost their lucrative American colonies to the 1776 Revolution. A good man, dead long ago, told me once: “All our political diseases come to us from Europe.” He said that with a tone of resignation that I heard many times after that. The long suffering countries south of the Rio Grande were born not to foster freedom but to compartmentalize the exploitation of the Empire that had one God, one religion, one language, one king and one monetary sign. The poison is still running through the veins of the imperial territories. It’s a crying shame if you ask me but in this 21st century, the curse of St Benedict “ipse venena bibas” seems to be beginning to have an effect: Europe is in crisis after having rejected its Christian roots the old continent has drunk its own poison to the dregs: Europe is dying as a result of embracing the same ideas she so generously spread around the world.
Europe has rejected its very roots
The Christian sap of life that allowed Rome to survive one additional millennia began to be rejected five centuries ago when the ideas of Luther, Calvin, and others began to contaminate Christendom. The German Reformation had many daughters: Illuminism, Liberalism, the French Revolution, Socialism, Marxism, and a legion of other pests too long to enumerate in one page.
One could describe this as a process that has transformed the culture of the West by means of abandoning all that is transcendental and embracing a form of banal materialism: that is all that remains of the Marxism of 19th century, the debunked ideas of Darwin, and the pernicious teachings of Freud. Such were the ideas that unleashed the 20th century upon mankind, arguably the bloodiest century in history so far.
Christian doctrine was abandoned to serve those three gods I just described. Christian charity was left behind to embrace the welfare state and so on. These are not mere affirmations. Charlemagne, a Christian king was the first to unite all of Europe under the banner of the Cross. Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile —rightly called “los Reyes Católicos” (the Catholic Kings)— not only consolidated Spain as a political unit, they also gave Europe the gift of the discovery of the Americas. The world is just beginning to surmise the huge influence of that event that joined two continents into one project that is still ongoing.
Christian Europe explored the world, codified the laws and gave impulse to the arts and sciences that enriched mankind. The Christian ideas gave Europe a sense of history.
Weeds among the Wheat
“He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers to collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’ — Matthew 13:24-30
Apply to Europe the rôle of the field in this parable. The enemy is, of course, the enemy of mankind. The weeds are the ideas that have always plagued human thought: heresies, superstitions, erroneous beliefs. Those were always present in the shadows even in the Christian faith every age had some kind of heretical weed that had to be combated. But although some were eliminated, others survived and began to grow in the last five centuries.
In looking at the field today we see the weeds towering over the wheat to the point that no wheat is visible. Forgotten religious observance, low attendance to Mass, disrespect of the Sacraments, empty seminaries, strange ideas preached from the pulpits. This sort of demolition began in earnest with the German Reformation and we can see a parallelism between that assault and the other political and military assault that hit the Catholic Spanish Empire shortly after. Christ provides a generic description of those types of actions in John 10:1 “… anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber.”
The Catholic Church was —from the times of the Apostles— the pen that kept the flock of Christ protected from error. Holy Tradition, Holy Scripture, and Right Reason formed the bulwark that protected the faith from the incessant assault of the enemies.
Notice how individual interpretation of Scripture breaks the strong three-walled castle of pure doctrine. Teachings other than ‘“free examination” such as the idea of not having a “work-based faith” took aim at destroying charity which is the very mortar of a Christian society. The “predestination” doctrine of Calvin created the foundations of predatory capitalism and set the stage for the growth of Marxism in centuries to come. Destroying charity is the best way to foster social divisions and envy. Under such ideas European society began to slowly but steadily to crack at the seams. What we had defined as Christendom, a realm of the spirit gradually became a mere territory: Europe.
Once the weeds secured their conquered territory, they began to plan the final assault on anything that had any resemblance of transcendence. Their incessant hammering began: “Scripture is superstitious and primitive, God’s revelation is a sublimation of the ego, organized religion is an instrument of oppression that impedes freedom and progress …” All those affirmations were supposedly based on “reason” but that reason was like a one-winged bird. Deprived of the transcendental element, “reason” soon began to engender monsters. The arrival of Nazism to the best educated European nation proves that point. Darwin’s idea of “survival of the fittest” was quickly used to justify the killing of human beings deemed to be “defective.” In the Soviet Union, the “defective” label was applied to political dissidents or some other “inconvenient” people.
In breaking away from its Christian foundations, Europe began to thread on a course of self destruction. Christ is way, truth and life. Any other choice is the opposite. So, when choosing to abandon Christianity Europe began to die. It is in the nature of a culture of death to die.
Quod scripsi, scripsi 