(This is my second post on this book, and the first two paragraphs are repeated from the first post, here, to orient readers who did not read that first post.)
Robert Cardinal Sarah (hereafter RCS) is a newly retired/resigned cardinal of the Catholic Church, originally from Guinea. He has been a voice of orthodoxy in a de-Christianizing world. In 2019, he penned a book entitled The Day is Now Far Spent, to describe his thoughts on the darkening of the world. The title piqued my interest, and on a whim I decided to read it.
While some of it is directed to the Roman Catholic community as an insider, there was much in the volume that resonated with themes in our own faith community. Of the many Christianities in the world, our own seems fairly impervious to pressure from the world to "update" its ways. Cardinal Sarah has faced down some of the same challenges as our own church, and his views are worth contemplation.
The thoughts for tonight are from the essay, "The Crisis of Faith." Sarah defines faith as "man's total and absolute confidence in a God he has encountered personally . . . People who have no faith are like those who have neither father nor mother to engender and renew them . . . Faith is a true mother . . . Faith implies and requires fidelity. . . . Faith is contagious . . . Faith is like the sun: it shines, lights up, radiates, and warms everything that gravitates around it . . . S light this powerful cannot come from ourselves."
He then moves from these thoughts to the question of what the faithful, whom he interestingly calls "the saints," are to do in this world. Here's one thing Sarah offers in response:
"The saints love and live in the truth and are concerned about leading sinners to the truth of Christ. They could never remain silent about this truth or display the least indulgence toward sin or error. Love for sinners and for those who are in error requires that we fight relentlessly against their sins and errors . . . [But] Christ never promised his faithful that they would be in the majority. Despite the greatest missionary efforts, the Church has never dominated the world. For the Church's mission is a mission of love, and love does not dominate. . . We do not have to make the Church acceptable to the world's criteria. We have to purify her so that she presents to the world the Cross in all its nakedness."
The world is in a crisis of faith at the present time. Of this, Sarah says, "In losing the sense of God, we have undermined the foundation of all human civilization and opened the door to totalitarian barbarity. . . Refusing to let God enter into all aspects of human life amounts to condemning man to solitude. He is no longer anything but an isolated individual, without origin or destiny. He finds himself condemned to wander through the world like a nomadic barbarian, without knowing that he is the son and heir of a Father who created him through love and calls him to share His eternal happiness. . . . God has come to free us from solitude and to give meaning to our freedom. . . Modern man has become solitary and autistic.
"If man forgets God, he ends up celebrating himself. He then becomes his own god and sets himself up plainly in opposition to God. He acts as though the world were his own privae doman. God no longer has anything to do with Creation that has become human property, from which it is necessary to profit."
If one wished to see a prime example of this, one need look not further than the Terasem Movement, founded by Rothblatt. This transhumanist project is pure Nimrodianism. Here's a sample:
"The common purpose of all of the Terasem Movement Foundation’s (TMF) projects is to investigate the Terasem Hypotheses which state that given:
"(1) A conscious analog of a person may be created by combining sufficiently detailed data about the person (a “mindfile”) using future consciousness software (“mindware”),
"and
"(2) that such a conscious analog can be downloaded into a biological or nanotechnological body to provide life experiences comparable to those of a typically birthed human.
"We call this event Transferred Consciousness (TC). If even the first part of the two Terasem Hypotheses is shown to be true, the conscious analogs will be independent persons with rights and obligations dependent upon their capabilities."
This is lonely, autistic barbarian land, where the barbarians see themselves as totalitarian gods, as Sarah as said. May God save us!