The rotting foundation of Europe. . .

It has been said by others before and said better than I can say it.  Europe has a rotting foundation.  The whole of the culture, erudition, arts, and tradition of Europe has faded and beneath its great tourist facade lies its decaying structure of faith and values.  The once noble Christian character that fueled learning, the cause of women, the end to slavery, and caused the fine arts to flourish has been replaced by skepticism, boredom, and immorality.  Some places have been slower to manifest the decline than others and some places are precursors of the future for the rest of the West -- should we fail to heed its warning.

I write this with a great deal of sadness.  And for the example of what will be without repentance, a renewal of the faith, and a resurgence of the Christian piety and life, I point you to Belgium.  Yes, Belgium.  As one writer had dubbed it: Belgistan.  You take an affluent, self-centered, morally adrift and bored people accustomed to ease, entertainment, socialism, and faith left to the very fringes of life, and you end up with modern day Belgium.  It is a country that has been ripe for the pickings of Islam.

Brussels was imagined as one of the great cities of Europe, like London, Paris.  The European Union thrust Belgium to new found prominence with the national governmental agencies of the Common Market and the primacy of banking and finance.  What should have been a rebirth became a fatal illness.

Belgium doesn’t only hold the record for jihadists in Europe, it is also the European country with the highest suicide rate. The most notorious suicide is the Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine, Christian de Duve, who, two years ago, killed himself in front of his four children.

Six suicides a day. With a suicide rate estimated at more than 20 per 100,000 inhabitants, Belgium breaks all records in Western Europe. The world average is 14.5 per 100,000 inhabitants. Suicide is indeed the first cause of mortality among Belgians between 25-44 and the second leading cause, after vehicle accidents, between 15-24.  The tragic statistic would grow if we counted the thousands of deaths that occur under the law of euthanasia, with six deaths per day. Belgium is also the site of the first “supermarket of death.”
Belgium is a country dominated by nihilism, where Islam is already the first religion. In the schools of the capital of Europe, the teaching of the Muslim religion has exceeded that of students of Catholic faith. A full 43 percent is studying Islam, and the same figure stood at 41.4 in high schools; 27.9 percent are following courses of “secular morality” (atheism), and only 23.3 percent opted for studies in the Catholic faith.  Already today, in Brussels, one in three people is Muslim, the most common name is Mohammed, and by 2035 it will be a city with a Muslim majority.

The great moments of life, such as baptisms, weddings and funerals in Belgium are no longer tied to Christianity, this in a country whose symbols have long been the cathedral of Antwerp, the dog of St. Hubert and the University of Leuven (founded by Pope Martin V).  In Brussels today only 7.2 percent of marriages are Catholic, only 14.8 percent of children are baptized, and there only 22.6 percent of funerals were Catholic. Read more here. . .

The end of Catholicism and Christianity in Belgium is being overseen by some of the most liberal bishops in the Roman Catholic hierarchy and, sadly, Francis is known to favor at least one of them, the fellow likely to become the primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium.

I write this only to show that people are spiritually hungry but the empty faith of liberal Christianity has little or nothing to offer.  In contrast, Islam does have something to offer -- conviction and obedience.  These are the very things that liberal and social Christianity have forgotten most of all.  We surrender our conviction to our feelings and the Scriptures to modern social trend.  We give up certainty over a wishful thinking that is powerless to grasp us from the abyss of our despair.  And then we give up obedience to the god of our feelings and desires so that nothing is really wrong except self-denial in any form.  The culture of me thrives only because it allows us to ignore our despair, it distracts us from the hopelessness so many feel in the midst of all that modern life has to offer, and it keeps us secure in our skepticism and doubt of anything objectively true -- until it all comes crashing down on us.  Then we are left with the struggle to find hope.  Islam does not offer much in terms of hope but it does offer order, conviction, and obedience.

If Christianity is to offer anything, it has to be a vibrant Christianity, replete with conviction and confidence, and strong enough to call us not only to repentance but to the obedience of faith.  During our time, we must not surrender the vital church of our ancestors to the spiritual and material decadence of the day or the rotting foundation of the West will only be hastened toward its final demise.  God will not surrender His Church to the gates of hell.  Neither should we.