Manchester Police Investigate Tweet Demanding
Action Against Islamic Terrorists
by Christopher A. Ferrara
May 24, 2017
The West is not dying. The West is dead. The West is dead because it has succumbed to what John Paul II called “silent apostasy,” which he lamented too little and too late after forty years of a “conciliar renewal” that was really an ecclesial surrender to the spirit of the age.
The West’s abandonment of the Christian faith is so complete that public attacks on Christianity are a routine element of public discourse, whereas the mildest criticism of Islam, which has been waging war on Christianity for more than a thousand years, is denounced as “hate speech” and even subjected to criminal prosecution in Europe, of which Hilaire Belloc once famously observed: “the Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” No longer. For as the same Belloc also famously predicted, a spiritually exhausted West would be overcome by a resurgence of radical Islam.
So what do we see in Manchester, England but this sign of the death of the West: The British columnist Katie Hopkins has been referred to the local police for investigation of her Tweets demanding that Great Britain take decisive action to defend itself against radical Islam, including this one: “Western men. These are your wives. Your daughters. Your sons. Stand up. Rise up. Demand action. Do not carry on as normal. Cowed.” The Tweet was in response to the government’s ludicrous policy that England will “carry on” without altering its mindless toleration of the Islamic cancer growing and metastasizing in its midst, no matter how many innocent people are slaughtered by Muslim fanatics.
Hopkins is not even a Christian. She declares that she has “little time for religion.” But even an agnostic like Hopkins is not safe from persecution when she commits heresy against the civic religion of the modern secular nation-state that has replaced Christendom, a civic religion that has only one dogma: Locke’s “law of toleration,” according to which the only people who are not to be tolerated are those who oppose toleration of the swarm of errors that overran Christendom once the alliance between altar and throne in the Catholic confessional state was destroyed by schism and violent revolution.
Among those errors is, of course, the civic toleration of any and all religions, including Islam. Any and all religions, that is, except Catholicism, the only real bulwark against the civilizational death we now witness. For as Locke declared of Catholics in his Letter Concerning Toleration, they believe in “doctrines absolutely destructive to the society wherein they live,” meaning that they believe that civil society must have the Catholic Church for its conscience and follow the higher law she defends and enunciates through the constant teaching of the Magisterium.
Should Hopkins be prosecuted for her “hateful” Tweet, she can make no appeal to any higher law but only to the same Law of Toleration that demands her prosecution. For as Pope Leo XIII presciently warned about the consequences of Locke’s “law” in operation: “If unbridled license of speech and of writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate… Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail.”
But who in the West, including Hopkins, will heed the great anti-liberal Popes today? Even Catholic churchmen, from the Pope on down, have buried their teaching. Such is the crisis in the Church since Vatican II.
The West is dead. Only a miraculous metanoia can bring it back to life now. But that miracle is precisely what Our Lady promised at Fatima once Her requests are obeyed, as they inevitably will be.